When I got into social-networking, I started out on MySpace. At that time, it was the only choice that I had, since Facebook hadn’t yet been released to everyone. The site served its purpose, in its own way of hiding information by not entering it, or matter of factly blocking the whole profile or not blocking at all. That was only the start of it.
MySpace is all about you creating a space of your own, something you can edit, change colors, backgrounds, add comments, pictures, as many youtube or other service’s videos as you want, bandwidth hogging auto-play music, seizure inducing gifs of snowmen moving back and forth across the entire background.
Sorry, bit of a rant there. My point is that the last 3-4 months of using MySpace was not spent looking at my friend’s or other’s profiles, it was spent looking into ways to avoid going through their profile to see their new pictures, comments, etc.
The Applications are Coming The Applications are Coming!
This occurred after Facebook had opened their doors to the general public. I had already learned the good and evil of third-party applications. Some were good, some were evil annoying. I had already figured out the process to take to block the applications that really annoyed me, and also get rid of those applications that I did install because they looked fun, but then started to spam me with update requests and notifications of other people (who weren’t on my friend’s list). I was at the tipping point, I was looking to go more with MySpace, then I saw a Mafia Wars notification on my feed inside MySpace. I deleted the request, the next day more, then dozens as people started to just let the application check their entire list and send the “Install me now” message.
[smartads]
I searched for a few days for some MySpace applications that might do me some good, something to keep me on the site, something that didn’t add a big ugly box to my profile. I found none. I was disheartened. Then Facebook updated their photo uploader to allow for more than one photo at a time. That was the straw (you can finish that one). I realized that the last reason I was sticking with myspace was the ability to upload an entire folder of images at the same time, caption them all, and save them to an album all in one shot. Now Facebook had it, and along with the easier time of blocking individual applications and the lack of seizure inducing profiles, and every friend that I had on Myspace, I had on Facebook, I clicked that “Cancel My Account” button and never looked back.
Conclusion
It’s been about 9 months now since I took the action I did. I haven’t looked back. I don’t wonder what has changed since I went over there. Periodically I’ll see a myspace link on one of my facebook friend’s profiles and click over. 5 minutes later after picking myself up off the floor I close the tab that has brought my browser to a complete halt because of the 5 auto-play video’s and memory hogging audio widget installed. Sometimes I’ll get lucky and there’ll be 2 or more auto-play audio’s on the profile, and I’ll either click that sweet little ‘x’ or if I want to read more (rare), I’ll search the slow-scrolling page for 5 minutes to find the source of the audio. Will I go back, nope. If they paid me, uh yeah, that should be obvious… of course I’d go back if they’d pay me, but they won’t, so I won’t.
Don’t forget about the “shoot the rabbit 5 times to get a free ringtone” and charge your phone $9.99/month ads.
–dez
P.S: After publishing this post I noticed what the ads placed were about… add that to the list of reasons that I said No to Myspace
