That…Space

As a webdesigner, or I guess as anyone who spends a lot of time working online, it’s easy to get a condescending view of tools that help people who know very little about the web create an online presence. It’s a childish and discriminative tendency, but time after time I fall into that trap and boycot tools like these for no good reason. The fact is, way back in the days when I knew very little about building websites, I used WYSIWYG editors and sliced-image table layouts. I used geocities, xoom, and angelfire to build my first pages. When I was first learning about content management, I even made use of blogger for a while. For some reason though, I had this disdain for LiveJournal. It was as if I thought I was technologically above it…until I found a friends LiveJournal page that I hadn’t seen since middle school. I realized then that it wasn’t just some toy for elementary school students, but rather a valuable tool for keeping up with friends.

For the longest time, I’ve had the same opinions about Myspace. I knew that some of my friends used it, but I refused to setup an account and insisted that they email or IM me. Well, after finally signing up a couple weeks ago, I again feel like I’ve been snob. There are a lot of people on Myspace that I know from my hometown, from high school, and from college. To make me feel even worse, the biggest group of friends (by far), are all the people from my Digital Media classes at UCF. These are people who now have cool jobs like designing rides at Disney, building 3d animation for gaming companies, and (like me) developing websites. So much for my theory. I’m just going to shut my mouth now and post my Myspace url: http://www.myspace.com/jasongraphix

For those of you reading out there with Myspace accounts, sorry for not doing this sooner. Go ahead and add me to your friend list if you haven’t already. If you don’t already have a Myspace account, here’s my shameless plug:

  • It’s free.
  • It’s easy to setup.
  • There are probably dozens of people on it that you already know (including myself).
  • You can use it as a blog if you don’t already have one.
  • You can customize the snot out of it. Honestly though, the only good example I’ve seen of this would be Chrissy’s profile.

7 comments on “That…Space

I had a mySpace account, but I nuked it shortly after I created it. Why? Because I wasn’t too keen on that little montage of “other people” that I had to look at all the time. You know, the one where everyone and their naked buddy are shamelessly flaunting themselves like it’s a porn site or something. Blah, not a fan of mySpace.

But, hey, congrats on your new page 🙂

Oh since we’re doing shameless plugs…
360 anyone?

Brian says:

While I have a myspace and a live journal account, I don’t really use it for anything. I think there are too many things to keep track of, it’s time for an rss reader. Also I don’t want to cross post to a gazillion different community web sites to accomodate those who want to stay in touch with me. We need a better solution but another community portal would only add to the clutter.

Chris Griffin says:

I feel like I’m plugging this guy now because I’ve mentioned his myspace in another myspace related blog entry but his is by far the best Myspace profile I’ve seen.

http://www.myspace.com/timbenzinger

@Ara: If you mean the “Cool New People” table…yea that bothers me too. There should be a box in the settings somewhere that allows you to uncheck “Show me desperate people’s profiles on my homepage”.

@Dustin: You’re so married to Yahoo! Alright, I’ll give it a try sometime…if you get a Gravatar.
(I’m waiting till your icon changes.)

@Brian: Yes, we need a portal site that allows you to manage your portal sites. A trillian for portal sites if you will.

@Chris: That’s pretty sweet! I’m tempted to customize my Myspace page, but I think I’ll wait a while to make sure I’m going to keep using it first.

Well, so far this post has gotten me one new myspace friend. Sorry for grilling you when you first sent the request Joey. Anybody else?

Well well, since I liked your old design so much, I didn’t realize your were using Gravatars on the new design until now.

Jason, I wouldn’t worry about the whole 360 thing. Afterall, I got one, wasn’t impressed, and now it sits and I do nothing with it. Just another wasted user account with my name on it.

On your feelings of MySpace, I share them with you. A couple months ago I met with some of my cousins I hadn’t seen in a while. One of them, very technologically ‘unaware’ of things asked me “So what do you do?” So I told him.

“I work at Yahoo! I’m a web developer”

He replied, “That’s like a search engine, right?”

I promptly added “Among many other things, yes, we have a search property”

Then out of nowhere he says “Do you have a ‘MySpace’?”

I couldn’t help but laugh and think the same thoughts as you. I am so above that. Who the heck uses MySpace and calls themself a professional.

Granted, you have to admit the accessibility disaster it outputs and horrible designs… but it’s the content and ‘sociableness’ that draws visitors to it. You just gotta give it to them.

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