Continuing our trek through the timeline of social networking, we arrive at a place… that I originally passed. MySpace was all the rage at the beginning of my high school career. Everyone had one: your best friend, that chick in Western Civ, your little sister, your favorite band, that weird Econ teacher, basically everyone except me. At this point I was perfectly happy with sitting on AIM and talking to biddies. Looking back on this decision to miss out on one of the epic social movements is likely due to one of three things (or all): a lack of appreciation for the site, a lack of internet speed, and a fear of not being included in people’s top friends. At this point, I was still on a dial-up connection waiting minutes for webpages to load while Napster was running in the background downloading the top hits of the year.
Looking back, yea, I wish I would have had a MySpace. I recently found out that some of my friends, who I thought were in the same boat as me, actually had a MySpace the whole time. It truly is an experience that I missed out on:
- I never got the chance to surf the web to find that page background that fit me perfectly.
- I never got to pick a name like “South-Side Chi-Guy” or ”Balla From Da Burbs” that allowed only people that I knew to know who I was.
- I never got to pick my top friends or be left out of someone’s top friends.
- I never got to take surveys asking me to choose between dark chocolate or milk chocolate, sprite or 7-up, BLUE or GREEN???
- I never got to post a blurb or blog vilifying someone who I hated, while never mentioning their name so I could preserve plausible deniability
- I never got to post my favorite (er, popular) songs on my profile so people could appreciate my taste in music.
- I never got to… alright, you caught me… I did have a MySpace. And surprisingly, it’s somehow still active.
MySpace was the start of something revolutionary. No longer was the internet comprised of e-mail, instant messaging, free Texas Hold ‘Em and 37% porn. MySpace revolutionized it into a harbor for social activity. Where nobodies like you and me could rub elbows with higher ups like actors, sports stars and musicians. It created a world where every person in the world, regardless of stature, had the same size webpage as you and became 100 times more accessible. This was the start of social networking.
I have been referring to MySpace thus far primarily in the past tense. To clear that up for a second, it still is a functioning website that brings in nearly 50 million hits per month. However it is widely considered to be past its prime. It was passed a few years ago by its main competitor Facebook, a site that has become so popular that a movie was created to tell its early story.
Why did Facebook pass MySpace? Was it the features or the template of the site? Maybe. In my opinion, the changing of the guard was due to its exclusiveness. When Facebook began, only those who had a @harvard.edu email address were allowed to join. Soon, all collegiate email addresses were allowed access to it and it became a sort of club that was only for college students; an online party. Like college parties, soon enough high schoolers were bound to show up. And that’s what I did. Because I missed out on the whole MySpace experience, I was one of the first to jump on the Facebook bandwagon… and I loved it.
There was now a way for me to keep in contact with all of my friends and to meet new ones. I am completely aware of how cheesy that sounds, but that’s exactly what it did. Here was a place that I could display my pictures, write all about me, and create status updates as often as I wanted. Yea, this website was awesome. I quickly turned my friends onto it, setting their pages up with them in the library after school and then quickly turning around to be the first person to write on their wall. With the old Facebook, you could personalize your profile with any app you wanted: iLike music, games, horoscopes, and ever girls favorite: picnic photo editing. Sure, it was similar to MySpace, but so much different.
Before I knew it, I was in poke wars with ones of people, constantly writing on peoples wall, making groups about everything and anything, and of course, changing friends’ profile info when they foolishly left their page logged in. Really Chris, you’re interested in men, your favorite movies include Gangbangs of New York and Edward Penishands, and your birthday is tomorrow? So much I didn’t know about you.
The biggest thing that Facebook brought us was an action that coined one of the greatest terms of our generation – creepin’. Everyone creeps. It’s a fact. You creep on your friends, your crushes, and anyone who hasn’t set their profile to private. It’s just what you did. One of the best days of the year for any guy on Facebook is when a smoking hot biddy gets back from spring break. Within hours of her plane landing, you know exactly what to expect… the first thing she is going to do is put up her album; and the first thing you’re going to do is browse through it. You used to be able to get as much information off a person’s profile page as you would in a first date. People would put their life stories on their page for the whole world to read. That’s where the creepin’ came in.
Facebook led to the demise of my former favorite internet tool, AIM. With the advent of Facebook chat, my two favorite internet activities could be combined. Now I can see our mutual friends WHILE talking to you, all in the same window? Great move Zuckerburg. The only negative to this move was there was no more playing stupid with screen name identities and starting up random chats with “unknown names.”
A new site has jumped on the scene in the last year and gained an extremely large following. By limiting everything to 140 characters, twitter is a simple and fun social networking site. It’s perfect for all types of tweeters. You have funny and comedic tweeters, your link to sports, news, athletes, celebrities, and of course the rest.
There are a lot of people out there who use twitter as a real source of news and other information and others who use it as nothing but a joke - hash tagging #anythingandeverything that they want to, even when it is completely #unnecessary. I personally enjoy twitter more than the other social networks out there mostly because I only have to come up with 140 characters, instead of whole blog posts like this… #runningoutofmaterial.
So the question is: why am I blogging now? Is it to compete with the same people who rejected my input over at Random Thoughts from "103.5 The Chill"? Maybe a little. But they’re more an inspiration then a competition. I always thought blogs were for important people, celebrities, or people who had something to say. But they aren’t. They’re for chumps like me who have nothing to say, because honestly, no one is going to read it.
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