Adventures in Social Media: Death of MySpace

“Adventures in Social Media” encompasses a series of recurring posts about all things social media from the perspective of a gal who likes to keep all her profiles private.

I basically lost my cool a few weeks ago. Who would have thought that chatting and interacting with random strangers on the Internets would backfire on a gal? Here’s a little lesson to all my fellow females out there, keep your finger poised to press on that block button at a moment’s notice.

I digress. My point is that people are weird, and they’re even weirder on the Internet where they are hiding behind a T1 line and an inconspicuous screenname with a perfectly angled default pic. Back to two weeks ago. One of the random dudes that I was chatting with turned out to be kind of crazy. The cute little “crush” he had on Keri Hilson was not actually an innocent celebrity crush but he actually DID THINK SHE WAS HIS GIRLFRIEND. After reading about this obsession on his Twitter page and his Facebook wall, I decided it was time to abandon ship. This situation came at a perfect time since I was getting a bit frustrated with social media. I finally admitted to myself that it takes up too much of my time, time that can be used watching reality TV shows and eating red velvet cupcakes.

So I disconnected. I deactivated my Facebook, abandoned my DailyBooth (as I hinted I would do last week), and deleted my personal blogs. I felt at ease. For approximately twelve hours. I just had way too much time, and there was no way  for me to communicate to anyone. At that time I truly realized how entrenched my entire life was in social media, and it wasn’t just me, all my friends as well. I couldn’t effectively get a hold of anyone if I didn’t tweet or write on their wall, so now that I don’t have the accounts to do that what am I left to do now? So I did what any logical and slightly restless gal would do, I signed up for a MySpace account. I just want to state that I have been on MySpace since my high school days, and was seriously addicted to it for quite some time. I was all about getting mass comments from my friends with the obligatory animated GIFs. Not to mention updating my default pic to a photo that was most likely taken in front of a mirror. But alas, Myspace quickly lost its allure.

There are many theories out there about the “death of MySpace”. Most social media professionals credit their downfall to Facebook’s immense success. There’s also the issue of numerous privacy issues that plagued many of its users. I can’t even tell you how many times my account was hacked. As a MySpace user, I deduce that its loss in popularity is largely due to what attracted its users to the site in the first place: customization. The MySpace layouts with flashing text, and shrinking profiles just got really annoying. You couldn’t go on a person’s profile without your browser crashing because of the sheer onslaught of bad code that it had to deal with. Not to mention that MySpace lost its main focus, which was music. New sites such as last.fm, IMEEM, and iLike (the last two were purchased by MySpace) were providing musicians and users a place to enjoy the music of their favorite artists without the inconvenience that they encountered on MySpace.

So why did I sign up for it again after knowing that it was no longer cool to be on MySpace? I honestly don’t know. I guess I missed the old days and I thought that opening up a new account would help me relive the fun I had. I was clearly wrong. The site has cleaned up a lot, but the new Profile 2.0 is a little too time consuming to tinker with. Not to mention that you can no longer make your entire profile private like before, which is a big deal breaker for me. I think what prompted me to abandon the site yet again was the lack of users. No one wants to be a part of a social network in which you can’t interact with your friends or meet new people. I got tired of people telling me that MySpace was “discoed out” and that no, they will not accept my friend request. So I abandoned MySpace as well.

Back to Facebook I go. I’m sorry MySpace, it was fun while it lasted.