Post 5 - MySpace Alternatives

While MySpace is a popular site with millions, or billions of users, in the last few weeks I have found that when talking to friends and family of mine, that many prefer Facebook. In fact one of my friends, who had previously been boycotting these ‘social networking’ sites, has even joined up herself. I thought I’d sign up to see exactly what the big appeal of Facebook is. From what I have heard, Facebook has all these added extras which you can send to your friends, as well as quizzes and compatibility tests. These all make MySpace sound very boring, plain and much less interactive. MySpace tends to just sit there, unless you chose to do something to make something else happen. I find the whole thing rather static. Unless you care about having thousands of friends, you stick to those that you know, and even if you add a few music artists, or celebrities, you still probably don’t have a thousand friends. Even posting comments is very one sided. You post a comment on someone’s profile, they reply on yours. So this could become confusing if you did not remember what exactly it was you wrote that they were replying to.

Another main activity of MySpace seems to be ‘pimping’ as it’s called your profile with colours, pictures and all sorts of bells and whistles. But there is not much constant interaction. Messages go back and forth, but there is always that delay in response, and you can’t post a lot of information in one message. This is why I prefer email, where you can say everything you need to say, including private information in as big a message as you want. It is possible to have a conversation through email, or better yet, instant messaging. Years ago that used to be all the rage, now it seems to have been pushed aside by these new social networking sites. I suppose the idea is that you can do all of these activities through MySpace or Facebook, but it is not even close to being the same sort of interaction. MySpace is almost like having a personal website, and just having it there for people to look at.

There are only two real benefits I see of using MySpace, the first is the ability to find people you have lost contact with –if they have a profile, and everyone seems to have a profile. The other is that you can upload all sorts of pictures that you can share with your friends. But you could probably do the same thing with a link to a photobucket or flicker album.