Like many of you, I chose not to do chatroulette as I had no desire to see any grown men naked. And since I couldn't figure out what on earth e-dosing was, I had no other option than to view 15 Myspace profiles.
I wasn't shocked when I first arrived at the home page. Though it has been years since I've actively used my Myspace profile (though I still keep it for sentimental reasons) I have occasionally gone to Myspace to look up various bands music that I would otherwise not be able to listen to. So the site redesign didn't surprise me at all, though I have always found it somewhat strange. The homepage is so dark and their new logo? My____? Yech.
Since I needed to look at 15 profiles, and I wanted to look at different people and not old friends that I once had on Myspace, I clicked the "people" tab on the front page. Thankfully, this allowed me to bypass actually logging in as I would never be able to remember my old password. Just looking down the first page of results, I can already see what several studies have confirmed: That Myspace's social networking function's primary demographic appears to be the Hispanic group.
Once I finally started clicking through profiles, I was somewhat surprised at how little that part of Myspace had changed. It was still the exact same format, people were still using awful html in their "about me" box to "spiff up" their profiles, and there were still music players on everyone's page (though, thankfully, it appears it doesn't auto-start anymore). I had forgotten just how slow Myspace ran due to all the clutter on the pages. The first girls profile I looked at listed her favorite movies as "anything with lots blood and gore and guts cutting people ,choping [sic] off heads and violence". She seems like a real sweetheart.
The more I look, the worse it gets. Horribly cluttered pages, glitzy backgrounds, .gifs and pictures everywhere, poorly taken pictures of people, spam on everyone's comments section, and generally people who, on first glance at their profiles, I would never want to meet in real life. There's so much glitter and sparkle on girls pages, it's starting to hurt my head. Of course, if I goto a guys page, I am inundated with pictures and .gifs of unclothed women with strategically located objects blocking anything overly risque. Of course, these are all covered with words such as "Happy 420 babee" [sic] and "Happy Hump Day" (with a girl clothed in only her underwear humping the ground).
Another thing I noticed is how many people have changed their names to, well, to not their names. For instance, on one profile, I see that Martin M is now friends with Fuk all duh hata's.
I realize I'm only saying negative things about myspace, but honestly, that's about all there is TO say. Of course, myspace's reboot has been directed at even more of a focus on music, which is a good idea. The problem with this, however, is that when even bands put in garish html coding and with how slow the website already runs, Myspace is nowhere near as effective in presenting music as sites such as last.fm. I don't think the site will ever recover to it's former standing with Facebook and Twitter overtaking them as social networking platforms. Looking at these profiles, I can't really say that's a shame.
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