MySpace reminds me of 1997

Yes, I've become a lightweight addict of Facebook. I'm certainly no complete Facebook automaton, endlessly writing wall posts and notes and making friends with people I carpooled once with in fourth grade, but yes, I like the connectivity, and I certainly have gotten in touch with old friends I never would have found or heard from otherwise.

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.

Facebook, for the uninitiated, is a website based around social connectivity. You sign-up into a network, which can be your high school, university or city or country of residence, and then, through that network and other searches, you begin adding friends. Now, once you've added a friend, you can then search through all of THEIR friends, and then you can add anyone with whom you and this new friend might mutually be friends, and so on, and so forth. Additionally, you can post an endless number of pictures and tag them (which means tracking who appears in what pictures, so you can create a catalog of images starring yourself from a variety of photographers with a few clicks), write wall posts (every user has an online public blackboard), send messages, write notes (their version of blogging), and search, search, search. I know people who lose hours, literally, hours a day on Facebook. Facebook is fairly technologically advanced, though; it uses a lot of inline Java elements, as well as an internally refreshing browser element (so you don't have to refresh the entire page for new content, a la GMail), and the tagging feature is just plain awesome.

Online, though, Facebook is not alone. Before Facebook came along, another site called Friendster became relatively popular. Using a relatively, if not far more simplified and technologically-outdated, model, you once again find friends through friends, ostensibly creating the same spider-web of a network through a myriad of friends signed up. A rather clunky predecessor to Facebook, but it certainly helped to open the door to the kind of unabashed internet exhibitionism and narcissism (perhaps most famously available on YouTube) that years ago would have seemed like identity-theft suicide.

I did the Facebook thing, though, and before that, the Friendster thing. I had a lot of friends on both, you see, and even though I resisted a Facebook account for the longest time (in some kind of kind-of-the-schoolyard I-was-here-first I'm-sticking-with-Friendster kind of illogical mentality), I finally signed up, because I knew too many users and it had simply become too socially commonplace to avoid (rarely a Shabbos meal goes by without it's mention). So, now I belong to Facebook and Friendster. You'd think I'd have the bases covered, wouldn't you?

Ah, yes, MySpace. Frankly, I don't really know how to explain MySpace. It's kind of like Facebook and Friendster, except instead of arranging your friends and pictures and notes in an easy-to-follow, organized fashion, it seems to take everything, throw it in the blender, chug it too quickly, get queasy, then vomit everything up on the page with some annoying background image and terrible music playing in the background. I avoid myspace like the plague. The few times I have been to a MySpace page, though, I've realized something - I think they took a look at the internet circa 1997, said, "hey, this is great! Let's make our site exactly like this!" and then did so.

Seriously, let's test this out. You tell me... which of these sites was made in 1997, and which in 2007?

ONE

TWO

Uncanny. It's like the late nineties got in a time machine and came forward ten years and had massive design diarrhea all over myspace and then ran away. Sounds disgusting? It is.

Anyhow, this post really has nothing to do with anything except for the fact that I spend far too much time on the internet and felt the least I could do was color it with some commentary, albeit sophomoric potty humor, at best. Hope you enjoyed this little diatribe.