On January 30th: The Reckoning

Myspace is for strippers that work from home.

–- Wallstrip

I will never get tired of that line. It should probably go on a t-shirt. Simon over at Bloggasm has finally had enough with myspace and I’m finding it really hard to disagree with him. He’s designated January 30 as International Delete Your Myspace Account Day and I think I’m pitching in. Since having it, I’ve put up with a lot of the annoyances, I’ve tried to use a combo of CSS and images to make the profile look a little less crappy, and I’ve used Greasemonkey scripts to kill a lot of the crap the site puts you through. I never visit the site except to tell them that all those really hot chicks with different profiles and the same photo are spam ad accounts. And it’s like AOL, the more accounts you report, the more that seem to spam you!

Simon has a good checklist to tell if your account may be in need of deletion:

1. You rarely log in to Myspace except to delete spam friend requests from nude webcam girls.
2. You spend five minutes writing a wall post only to hit an error message when you try to post it because of all the website glitches.
3. You’re a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the middle east.
4. You visit someone’s Myspace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. Bonus points if it happens to you while you’re at work.
5. You have to make redundant clicks to perform simple tasks because Myspace keeps taking you to advertisement pages where you have to click on “return to myspace profile” in order to continue what you’re doing.
6. You visit someone’s profile only to have your eyes bleed because of terrible page layout with non-matching designs and font colors.
7. Your experience is hindered because of intrusive banner ads that either talk to you or try to reach out and block your view of what you’re trying to look at.
8. You read yet another news account about how some child predator using Myspace has abducted a little girl or that some hoax myspace account has caused a teenager to commit suicide.
9. You’re frustrated with the fact that Myspace doesn’t allow you to post your contact info, meaning to contact someone you can only use Myspace’s glitchy Instant Messenger, message/email system, or wall commenting.
10. You’re tired of seeing Tom stare out at you from millions of friends lists and just wish he would change his fucking profile picture.

What I find a little ironic is that in this mini-social networking war, Facebook is sort of declared the de facto winner as there’s already a Facebook event set up for the day. Terribly amusing to me is the number of people who are commenting/posting very clear statements of “I never had a myspace account.” which is fine if you’re spreading the word to people you know that do have them but otherwise… what’s your point? I’d also be curious to hear from folks with myspace accounts for other reasons, self-promotion, business, event planning. I’m sure it’s a great way to reach a certain type of audience, but really how effective is it?

Still, like Fredo says, I’m waiting for someone to start circulating petitions to get rid of annoying Facebook applications. There’s already a group/petition running to get rid of spamming apps, currently 53,476 members!

So who’s next? Friendster… I’m looking at you.