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School officials recommend students contact the police if they are feeling threatened by others online.

"It is unfortunately used as a tool for harassment," Camacho-Light said. "I believe it's not even legal in a sense on MySpace. But it expands so fast that it's almost impossible to monitor ... MySpace is not a safe place and that worries me. I find MySpace to be a scary place."

Okay, time to plead ignorance. Can someone explain, succinctly, what MySpace is actually all about? The site itself is so ugly and disorganised that I can't figure out its aims. Is it like Livejournal? But I understand you can host your music on it? And emo kids hang out on there? Anything I'm missing?

BTW, Gilroy is the garlic capital of the US (formerly the World, but Chilean garlic is very big now). We must have a MeFi Meetup at the Gilroy Garlic Festival some year.

MMM... garlic.

The adult tech/vocational school I work at just banned MySpace at the central office level, effectively cutting off about a dozen (albeit smallish) campuses around the US.

Frankly, I'm not really upset.

A) If I really want MySpace at work, I can set up my own goddamn proxy server.

B) The (again, 'adult') students at the school I work at do not own their laptops - the school owns them until they graduate. MySpace isn't a valid use of school time - nor my work time - and it's a massive, humongous bandwidth hog. Many, many profiles feature embedded music or video streams. MySpace traffic.

This vastly hinders my pageload times for metafilter, which is sometimes actually a valid use of my work time, as I often hit AskMe up to look up questions and answers. (My boss was actually stunned at how fast I found a solution to an arcane Windows server issue via AskMe and E2.) Same with Wikipedia, everything2.com, technet, and more.

I use MySpace for networking and as a backup host for my art shit, but, eh, it's pretty damn terrible.

Where do you work, loquacious? Not being nosy (well, maybe a bit), I work in pretty much the same industry.

Jimbob, MySpace is a way to keep in touch with a lot of people all at once. A lot of people from my high school use it- it's a way to keep tabs, be nosy and see what people are doing...

But I agree that's it's one of the slowest, worst-laid out "big" sites I've ever seen.

I find MySpace to be a scary place

me too lol

Don't high school kids just like hang out anymore?

As far as I can tell it's Friendster with ugly backgrounds.

Myspace is a tool for advertisers to learn all about you and your product preferences, so they can better target their pitches.

It is strange to see a public school system rebuff the advertising industry in this day and age.