R.I.P. MySpace

I have to admit, I have really neglected this blog during the past few months. When I started this blog last August, I posted dozens of posts in that month, and afterward, I have just seemed to have gotten a little negligent. Well, those days are going to change. It's not likely that I am going to post as much as I did at that August, but I do promise to post a little bit more than I have been. And it all starts right now...

As I said, I haven't been posting much, but when I have been posting, it has mostly been to eulogize some of the notable people that have died at that time (such as Ted Kennedy, Abe Polin, etc). And this particular post will continue in that tradition, and will be to eulogize something else... which is MySpace.com.

I know that I might be a little bit late in saying this, but during the past few months, I personally experienced how far down MySpace has fallen...

In the mid 00s, MySpace was the biggest thing going in Social Networking, beating out the likes of Friendster, AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, Bebo, and whatever else was out there (even Facebook, when they were strictly just for schools, colleges, and alumni). I started a myspace personal account in 2005 to connect with some of my friends in high school, and some other people I've connected with on the Internet, and thought it was pretty cool. About more than a year later, I started a music profile to promote my motivational CD "The ULTIMATE Crash Course". I was able to build the network in that particular profile to an astounding 25,000+. And from there, I was able to let people listen to snippets of my CD, promote some of my motivational pieces/videos, do a R.A.P., and even sell a few CDs here and there. What I thought was cool about myspace, was that I found a way (using a friendbot) to greet everyone a happy birthday the Monday before there special day. And with that, I gained a lot of appreciative "friends" who truly wanted to connect with me.

But herein lies the problem. MySpace had a flaw in their system, which made it easy for people, hackers, and advertisers to put viruses in your computer (whether knowingly or unknowingly) through scripts, and other technical jargon I don't understand. People started getting abusive. Therefore, MySpace had to make drastic changes to their system so people who abused it can't get as much out of it anymore. Problem is, they took away a lot of what some of us law-abiding users deemed beneficial. For example, people with more than 5000 friends can't view the birthdays anymore, so not only can the friendbot that I used pull out who has a birthday in a week, but I (the human being) can't even see who has a birthday anymore. This, among a lot of the other things (like the fact that a lot of their "new(er) stuff" like application integration, status feeds, and "the lite version", was late to the party and discovered by Facebook months beforehand) made people not really care about their site anymore. Personally, I've only logged onto myspace twice THIS MONTH. I used to log into it everyday. And, when I do log into myspace, all I get in my inbox are hundreds of event invites to events that I'm not going to, ingenuine messages that I can't read, as well as spam that everybody (including myspace themselves) send out. Arrgh! I used to get tons of meaningful messages everyday from people thanking me for what I've done, and I don't even get those anymore... because I couldn't really give them a reason to.

Not to mention, MySpace is too commercialized now. Even more-so when Rupert Murdoch bought it. Facebook is commercialized too, but all these pop-ups and blatant sponsorship ads in videos and music players on myspace totally get in the way and take away from the experience. In Facebook, most of the ads that lag your computer are in the applications. And, you don't have to add those if you don't want to.

It's really a shame that MySpace fell as far as it did. Don't get me wrong, people are still using it, and it's still ranked pretty high in alexa.com (with a ranking of 17). But, twitter has now officially passed it (with a ranking of 12), and Facebook is destroying it (with a ranking of 2, only behind Google)! It stinks too... because like I said, I have built a 25,000+ following on myspace because it was the next big thing in 2006. But, since nobody really cares about myspace anymore, and not as many people log into it... it doesn't matter as much. You can't really connect with people as well on there anymore.

In closing... I just wanted to say R.I.P. Myspace. Kind of makes me wonder if MySpace inventor Tom has a Facebook.

(Feel free to add me on the other social networking sites out there...)

Facebook: http://facebook.com/Obedoza

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ObeCorp

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-obedoza/19/742/ba0

D4P...PD!!!

-John