Using MySpace makes me feel dirty. Like I just visited a trailer park and ate potato chips and watched TV commercials with strangers while fleas crawled on the carpets. Recently I logged in and it was like a condemned slum in hell: the site had been converted into a sidebar to a giant “Guitar Hero” advertising campaign, marked by vivid oranges and fiery reds…Even the flames of the inferno were simulated by the lovely animated Guitar Hero graphics. Just to remind me that each click is truly part of the descent downward…
I’ve stuck it out several years, fluctuating between logging in daily to try and add new “friends” that I will never engage with in a meaningful way, or totally block the site from my consciousness for months at a time. While your hideous layout, icons and EVERYTHING else are terrible enough, the lethargy of your ad-choked servers has turned even the most benign process into a tedious bore.
The only upside I could see in all these years, aside from meeting a few very damaged women for strange liaisons, was that MySpace had become the epicenter of online music marketing. I marveled at the bands with millions of fans, billions of listens, etc. Especially given how time consuming it is just to add a friend. Boy they must have a lot of money, to hire little monkey boys to click through accounts all day long. Alas, the day came when I learned of the inside track – “the MySpace bot.” Little software programs designed to automate marketing functions, leaving the braindead activity of participating in MySpace to the computer while I searched for signs of life elsewhere. That sure got my hopes up. It at least made things bearable. I mean, my software proxy has basically conducted all my MySpace personal interactions for the last several months. At least. And that’s probably the only reason why I haven’t just canceled my account.
Oh, and I forgot one REALLY important point – The good bots are separate programs, and don’t even require you to have a browser open. Which means, YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO LOG IN TO MYSPACE. You never have to see a horrifying full page graphic for the latest piece of cultural garbage, or get the shivers from an eyeful of crass icons implying endless permutations of meaningless functionality.
The point being, that I was tolerating this relationship. I hadn’t gotten the courage to quit you completely. But you’ve made it impossible to continue. I tried to run my bot tonight, add me some friends, send some messages out to the atmosphere, do some “mass marketing,” etc. But the bot wouldn’t send any messages. So I was forced to log into your internet vomitorium, where when attempting to “Compose” a message (You make it sound so profound), I was informed that users with over 2000 friends “cannot use this function” or some other nonsense.
So, you’re telling me, that at MYspace, aka the “place for friends,” that because I have a lot of friends, I lose my privilege of communicating with them? ! Well that is just dumb. But you’ve made this very easy for me. So I just wanted you to know that this is goodbye.
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Update: For an awesome article on MySpace, read How To Defeat and Kill The Devil MySpace
Hahaha! Yeah, Myspace has been like the necessary evil of grassroots music promotion these days. I’ve had some luck getting new listeners in my area by contacting them on myspace, but the user experience on the site sucks…
In case you really didnt know. You can stil send a message. You need to visit a profile and click send a message. The compose feature loads your friends list in a dropdown menu and is thus disabled for large accounts. 🙂 Facebook doesn’t have this problem because you can’t have more than 5,000 friends on Facebook.
Another tip: look up in the nav when you are on a profile. There’s a dropdown called “user shortcuts” which lets you choose ‘send a message’ before the page has even fully loaded. That way, even if a user has filled the profile with videos, slideshows and pictures, you can get in and out quickly. MySpace aint so bad. And you can’t hate on the “strange liaisons”–enjoyed a few myself.
No complaints on the strange liaisons front!
Thanks for the user tips. They would be helpful if I were to still use the site, but at this point I try to avoid it as much as possible. It has been blacklisted by my aesthetic sensibilities…
Good luck with it, though, and I’d love to hear some MySpace success stories.