Recently I realized that I barely spend any time on MySpace. I still respond to emails I get from friends there and friend requests, but I don’t just hang out to see what’s going on. I definitely don’t play with the instant messenger features anymore because they’re just sub par and I find that most MySpace users that I socialize with don’t use them. The shine has well worn off for me.

I guess that the MySpace folk are starting to realize this as well. They’re planning on launching a social news site, much like Digg, so that users can submit and vote for news articles. Personally, I don’t see this encouraging me to spend more time on the site. Using MySpace for your up to date news coverage is no better than listening to High School bathroom gossip. I also hope that the level of commentary from MySpace users will be more mature than that of the vast majority of Digg users. The thought of another avenue for a bunch of teenaged guys to tear each other to shreds for no reason does not strike me as entertaining. Unfortunately I think it will go the way of most MySpace pages — littered with grainy video and audio tracks that automatically play pasted over swirly animated backgrounds with unreadable text.

At any rate, check out this Wired article and let me know what you think.

[Link to Wired News: Exclusive: MySpace News Pics]

Has anyone else experienced any problems logging into MySpace? Right now I can’t log in at all, but it does acknowledge that my account exists. Earlier I was able to log in but all of my Friends were missing (deleted profiles) and my profile had been reverted to how it looked when I first logged in. At another point in time when I logged in, my profile was in tact but I couldn’t access the new message I logged on to get.

Anyone else? Bueller?

Recently I’ve read a lot of articles about MySpace. The vast majority have been negative, although a few bloggers have pointed out some positive aspects of MySpace and how it is effecting how we communicate. I have recently reconnected with some friends that I met as early as first grade which is definitely something I am grateful for. To find these people, however, I had to fight through hundreds of profiles that only the blind could appreciate. I’ve had to install plug-ins for Firefox that cripple music that plays automatically when you load a profile, and avoid pages with auto-playing video clips. At one point in time I found a MySpace profile that actually got my browser to lock up on a regular basis. Putting the gross design flaws and ghastly aesthetics aside, MySpace seems to be a meeting place for people who are unable to write in complete words or sentences so it’s not the place to go for philosophical debate.

I can forgive some of the shortcomings of MySpace and some of the negative trends in online communication that it seems to have inspired. The thing that seems to bother me the most is how it’s degraded the meaning of the word friendship. I think that this problem started back when Friendster was the new hotness. After about a week it became a popularity contest and everyone tried to add everyone else to their little friend list. I thought it got ridiculous when people had hundreds of friends but only knew a handful of them. Now the same disease seems to have infected MySpace. I personally know all of my MySpace friends with the exception of one celebrity. Celebrities and Bands are the exception to the rule because the more friends they have the more fans they can directly touch. In fact I’m considering requesting to be added to more Celebrity and Band friend lists just for the bulletins and updates. The reverse of that is I’m sure that those public figures get bombarded with bulletins from all of their fans.

Since I joined MySpace I have had over 20 friend requests from people I have never met or spoken to with no attempt to start a conversation beforehand. When I reject these requests from complete strangers, I find it amusing that some of them take offense. There’s not much difference between sending out Spam and begging random MySpace users to be their friend. I’d love to ask some of these people who have hundreds of MySpace friends how many of them they actually know. By “know” I don’t mean one or two emails or a couple of IM conversations. I’d also love to hear how these people define the word friendship — I’m sure it’d be worth a laugh.

So, like everyone else, I joined Friendster. I got my friends to join Friendster. Now their friends are joining Friendster. Now that almost everyone you know is on Friendster, what do we do? There is no classified board to sell your junk. There is no threaded message board where you can have an intelligent discussion about things. There are no clubs or groups within Friendster, save some obnoxious cliques. Right now I’m trying to figure out what the hell the point of Friendster was. It’s a really big popularity contest and perhaps the idea is earning the CEO some dollars, but other than that I have really found it to be worthless. Since I’m not trolling for a date, or trying to find a long lost friend, there’s absolutely no point.

In my quest to find a Friendster replacement, I’ve found Tribe.net. Tribe does everything that Friendster does better and faster and it also does all of the things you wished Friendster did. You can sell your stuff, troll for a date, join a group, AND have a THREADED forum-style discussion! Needless to say I have joined Tribe and I’m planning on checking it out. I hope you guys who read this silly weblog will at least check the site out and maybe make an account and we can start a little club and stuff. I also hope I can convert some of those Friendster people. Let’s move on, people. Down with Friendster! Tribe.net forever! *smirk*