My Space?

Okay, I don't get it. What the hell are you really supposed to do on My Space? Why is it supposed to be so damn much fun? I was a little slow getting to the internet. I was a little poor back then and working hard, so when I finally bought a pc and hit the information superhighway I was hooked. I've been an internet junky ever since, but I am slow to jump onto every new band wagon. I had heard of My Space a few times, but I wasn't interested in it. I actual first visited My Space because of work. A few of our clients with higher ich factors aren't allowed internet access by law. Someone reported a couple of Yahoo personal ads and a My Space account, so I started trying to see if any of my sex offenders were on either site. I haven't found any of mine yet, but these people tend to be very sneaky, and we did catch a couple on other caseloads.

Anyway, my wife went nuts again. This is how I refer to her new hobbies. Everytime she gets a hobbie, she dives in headfirst and thinks of nothing else until it starts boring her. This time it was chickens. We now raise chickens. This isn't a bad thing as I like eggs. However, it is probably cheaper to buy the eggs, than feed the chickens. Also, baby chickens are very cute, and since I grew up in the county, I like hearing the roosters. Anyway she joined several chicken raising groups, and there are a lot of kids on those groups and every single one of them had an account on My Space. So she had to have a page on My Space. I offered to let her have mine, after all I just wanted the signon to look for probation violations, but when she found out why I had it, she didn't want it. So she built a page, then she built another page, then she fancied up my page. This is funny. As near as I can tell, that's what you do. You try to make your page as outrageous and fancy as you can within the prebuilt limits and try to get people to visit it.

I started with the internet many moons ago. I built my first two websites using note pad and html code. Then I discover Frontpage and used it until Dreamweaver came my way. I've played a little with Javascript and Flash. I am no expert, but I have my feet wet. I like building sites, and I don't get My Space. You are very constricted in what you can do. Maybe that's the challenge, to work within and around the built-in limits.

If you haven't been, basically My Space was designed to let users customize a single webpage. You are encouraged to find and borrow or steal backgrounds, templates, music, videos, from different areas of My Space or related support sites and put them on your page. Animated GIF's are very big, they have a sort of weak blog area on every page. You can make this public or restrict it to your friends list. You can upload pictures and some video. Then you try to get people to put you on their friends list and/or request to be on yours. The main part of your page is your profile.

My Space was designed as a virtual meeting place for Teens, I think. It became popular with slightly older people and some other sites are targeting the preteen/teen set harder now. My Space gained a lot of publicity because of some pedofiles being caught on it. Maybe I'm too old, but I don't get it. For one thing, it doesn't work that well, or it doesn't for us. It often takes 3 or 4 tries to sign in, and when we get in, it is often very slow, or pages won't even load. All kinds of errors pop up often.

The internet has launched many phenomena. Ebay, Yahoo, Google, AOL are all good examples. AOL and Yahoo provide some services, but offer a community as well and have been very successful. Ebay and Google rely more on services although Google is try to branch out and Ebay does have some community type features. I have also seen some attempts fail miserably or do well for a while and fade after the luster of new is gone. Will My Space survive like Ebay or is it a fad? Will one of the imitators out there undercut it, or will something replace it? Second Life seems to be the next big grab for people's time and attention, but it costs money to really get going on Second Life and My Space is free.