It's just a bad day, I guess. I did the MySpace thing just to get a little levity. Worse stuff has happened.

/moron

I went to MySpace once and it kept telling me that every page I looked at was my friend, it made me feel very creepy.

Isn't MySpace basically just a rehashed and rewrapped Geocities but with a cooler name?

And no, I have not been back.

fenriq- it seems to be that way. I was interested in the marketing angles, they have so much info out there and I was reading an article about it and thought I'd see how it all works. Burnt.

Just had to make a new Gmail account and bury myself.

blecch

I am just too old for MySpace. To me, it's ugly and hideous in design, creepy in its real-world implications. I'm happy to let this one ride, even though every musician feels it absolutely necessary to have and use MySpace.

Yep, the music thing also got me there. Even bands with 'proper' websites have a Myspace accoutnt. Frickin' why? Blogger/YouSendIt/EZarchive not enough?

Its about easy contact with your market demographics for the musicians, I'd think.

I've got two nephews who love it, they didn't seem to see the issue with having "friends" who were in their 40's checking out their pages.

That's the ick factor for me, I just have this feeling that anyone my age surfing MySpace is inherently up to no good. Which kind of makes me sad for myself that I think that but I've been subjected to an awful lot of Dateline's To Catch a Predator so that's probably why my faith in humanity is low presently.

I still occasionally get a reminder from M.S. alerting me to how much fun it would be to get on board and respond to a person i know who has a M.S. page. That I could be his friend and HE HAS GIVEN THEM MY EMAIL ADDRESS SO THEY CAN CONTACT ME!!!! I don't want to be his friend. He is nuts. Leave me the fudge alone M.S. bot!!

/rant

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The ick factor never occured to me. And I also don't require anymore downgrading of the race. Just wanted to hear some mp3s, your honour man. Argh. Damn community websites.

Hang on a minute....

Funny ... I started a myspace account to keep track of some of my California friends--they all resolutely ignore e-mail but respond to myspace messages like *snaps fingers* that--and have tried multiple times to get myspace to invite people in my google address book.

It steadfastly refuses to do it.

Thus there is balance in the universe.

What's worse, Miko, is that musicians have started jettisoning their normal webpages for myspace pages. I was booking a big, two-night show earlier this year [it's an annual thing, and I've done it for a few years] and I noticed that between last spring and this spring, every band's got an awful, hideous myspace page. It got to the point where I ended up deciding to ignore any band that didn't have a normal webpage [or contact info on a label page.] Which was too bad for some of the bands - it was a good show, but jesus fuck, myspace is awful, and I refused to get an account just so that I could message them.

I do not understand why MySpace is so ugly. The few pages I did see were like zombie pages from the prehistory of the intarnets with twinkling star backgrounds and embedded midi heavy metal.

Mmmmmm..... embedded midi heavy metal.

Dateline's To Catch a Predator

Yeah, that is quite an eye-opener even for the non-hysterical.

musicians have started jettisoning their normal webpages for myspace pages

This is just short-sighted. The MySpace interface is so miserable, no one should ever expect a booker to have to deal with it.

I joined MySpace because everyone here was talking about it (I'm such a joiner) but I keep debating about taking it down. It just sits there, but I don't do anything with it.

I've joined Yahoo's 360 thingie because some other friends have (see above note about being a joiner). It's much, much more sedate.

If you want to know why most musicians don't consider having a myspace page optional and have a lot of time to wade through annoying text I wrote, see here and here.