I made a MySpace page. I had a total of 76 friends (all real friends I had in real life). I held onto the account for nearly 6 months and checked it almost everyday. However, yesterday I deleted it. Why? Because even if it’s a way to find friends you haven’t talked to in a long time, or a place to easily send event invites to your best buds’, or a great way to share interests, it’s crap. For that and many other reasons, MySpace is something I can’t get behind.

To think of all the complaints against corporate control of the internet, with net neutrality, and internet regulations coming from state and federal levels every year it’s unbelievable so many ‘net users are on Fox owned MySpace. With Washington lobbyists barking down the neck of every legislator to rip away what freedom people gained from the internet and still some corporate controlled social network has more subscribers than any other. As soon as it was common knowledge that the guy who designed MySpace was knee deep in spam and adware creation prior to mimicking Friendster with some butchered code, every subscriber should have jumped ship. No, instead the numbers kept climbing. Even after Rupert Murdoch bought the site the numbers climbed. Even after Murdoch stated, “The greatest thing to come out of this [the war in Iraq] for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil.” The numbers kept climbing. I don’t care if my best friend from second grade is only on MySpace. I refuse to get behind something I firmly stand against.

That wasn’t the only reason. I was also discouraged with the “social” part of MySpace in general. Think about it, if any of these long lost friends really wanted to find you they probably could’ve Googled you some time ago. And on the flipside, how many of those friends do you actually talk to regularly now that you and he/she both have MySpace accounts? And even if you do keep regular correspondence don’t tell me you haven’t noticed why you grew apart in the first place. Let the relationship die already! Half the time when you get back in contact you’re just reminded of the annoyances that pushed you away in the first place. These “friends” are the ones sending out those stupid bulletins about being saved by Jesus or how great it would be if we just bombed all them “A-rabs.” Or they’re the ones constantly hassling about why you never hang out at “Wild Woody’s” when they invite you. What’s the motivation in rekindling that sort of thing? You finally lost these people back when you graduated high school, now you have to lose them again!

Maybe you don’t have these issues. Maybe you live in a MySpace utopia of perfect friends that all have the same favorite neighborhood bar and drink the same microbrew you do. Or maybe you don’t mind avoidance. Or (this might be the one) you finally have your pulpit that no one can arrest. You’re finally the star of one page on this big scary World Wide Web. Everyone will finally see how unique and special you are. They will read through all your interests with baited breath. They’ll pounce on your blogs as soon as you post them and start exchanging anecdotes like, “My friend [your screen name here] said the funniest thing last week” with their coworkers. Yeah, I’m sure you’ve experienced a lot of that. Trust me, if you think people are actually looking past your pics’ you’re delusional (and they’re only doing that to see how fat you got since high school).

Alright, I apologize. MySpace has good points. When I’m bored I like to look up what my friends are up to and it’s a relatively good tool to accomplish this (so is a telephone). It’s nice that grandma can check out how big Becky has gotten when she has a hard time visiting (or because your lazy ass can’t “find the time” to drive over there). It’s also a fantastic tool for pedophiles and to bring on seizures in epileptics. So yeah, keep using it. Propagate the machine with beautifully untainted demographics advertisers can use to tailor the most hilarious viral videos to be uploaded on YouTube (which, by the way is a great service if you want to post ‘em on your friend’s MySpace).