As an old retired guy I have the opportunity and time to ponder the difficult questions of the modern age; questions like “Is the War against terror winnable?” “Can the so called stimulus package help the economy?” “How can I help in the fight against global warming?” and the most perplexing question of all, “Which is better Facebook or MySpace?”
Since I’m still on hiatus from political observations I will thoughtfully consider the final question in that little list. Almost every day I use both of those on-line free services and find interesting and advantageous features on each. It is also true that both sites have silly, annoying and inane traits that have a wide range of irritability. So let’s look at these modern marvels and compare.
MySpace was the first site of the genre that I joined. A lot of my family members were on and it seemed like a neat and trendy thing to do. There are ways to search for new and old friends. There are several ways to pass messages back and forth to the friends you find. There is a pretty easy to use place to post blogs. Putting pictures up on your site is also a simple task. And the “bulletin board” feature can sometimes be useful. So it was cool and I started using some of the features. Since I have this fantasy that I can write a little I found the blog posting area one of the best parts of MySpace. Through the use of that feature I built a small but loyal group of readers which is satisfying in both an artistic and egotistical sense. The friend finding features are also good and I met or reconnected with quite a few people. Some of the relatives I contacted have gotten to be excellent friends as well as cousins and such. A few high school acquaintances have also become regular correspondents through the site. One other feature of the blogging area is the availability of reading material in the “Top Blog” section. So those are the principal advantages of MySpace.
On the down side MySpace can be awfully annoying in many ways. The log-in page with all the celebrity driven advertising junk is particularly bothersome. I realize that the advertising sales helps to keep the site free but the ads, aimed at the average twelve year old kid, all look the same after a while. And if you have a slow dial-up connection on your computer, like maybe .002 percent of us, then those ads delay getting to the actual useful pages. Also the pop-up ads on other pages are intrusive and cause my computer to lag behind the rest of the world. MySpace also has a lot of things you can add to your site to “pimp” it up as they say. Somehow, probably because I’m old, that phrase is somewhat insulting. It uses a pejorative word, pimp, to describe embellishing a profile page. I suppose it means to imply that pimps are flashy dressing characters and adding flashy things to a page imitates that type of behavior. But it’s kind of like all the “gangsta” stuff in hip-hop and rap music that people like to imitate, which basically glorifies bad people by adopting their style of dress and attitude. The fact that it all looks pretty ridiculous is beside the point. Anyway, I haven’t “pimped up” my page just because that’s what they call it.
The MySpace bulletin board can be useful but is most often a place where politically motivated or religiously motivated folks spread their various messages. It also is a place where people pass on interminable and usually silly surveys. So I tend to ignore the bulletin section most of the time.
A large number of the people that I know on MySpace have migrated over to Facebook or else they are using both pages as I do. Facebook has actually been around longer than MySpace. It was started by some college people at Harvard and was used primarily by that age group for some time. Recently it has picked up millions of members and is the largest site of its type on the internet. Why would all of those people leave MySpace and start using Facebook?
Facebook has a less advertising laden look to most of its pages. The information on what your friends want you to know about them starts up quickly. It’s true that a lot of that stuff is repetitious but that’s sort of like conversations with a people you know. The messaging place is easy to use and private if one needs privacy. If you want the whole world to know what you’re discussing with your friends you can use the “wall-to-wall” feature. There are a whole bunch of applications available on the site but they’re easy to ignore. If you don’t want to send virtual gifts, take part in silly surveys or become a fan of this or that store or entertainer then you don’t. But if you like to categorize everything and everyone you can have all kinds of sub-groups and personalized lists of people. I play Scrabble with my youngest daughter on the site continually, even though she beats the heck out of me all the time. There are other on-line games available through Facebook as well.
Probably the best thing about Facebook is the ease of finding people that you know using the “friend finder” feature. And the fact that over 150 million people use the site gives you a fair chance of finding someone you know. I have actually become reacquainted with quite a few people from my high school days. When I was in high school I wasn’t particularly social and I certainly didn’t belong to any cliques but now it’s sort of nice to have these good people on my friends list. After 45 years I finally am in a clique, the people on Facebook clique, rarified company for sure.
The annoying things about Facebook aren’t too numerous. The repetition I already mentioned. (Subtle humor attempt) The silly applications can be tiresome, although I use some of them. And the lack of a good blogging space is a definite downside. The “notes” page can be used as a blogging site but it doesn’t lend itself to easy reading nor does it have an article type layout. Links to other blog-spots can be added to one’s profile page but that is not as good as the MySpace system.
So that’s a comparison of MySpace and Facebook. The amazing thing is that thirty years ago this type of communication device was not even imagined. We went from hand written letters to email to chat rooms to communication and entertainment sites like these in the blink of an eye it seems. Cell phones have access to these sites as well, opening another avenue for inter-personal communication. If people truly want to create a global community the tools are at hand. I’ve seen folks from Europe, Asia, Canada, Australia and other places using these sites. But I’ll bet I’m like most people when I admit that I haven’t tried to add any of those folks to my friends list. It would be easy and most likely quite interesting to start corresponding with people from other countries. I’ll leave that to a younger generation which is more comfortable with all these technological innovations.
Meanwhile I’ll use both sites to stay in touch with family and friends, share my musings and have a little entertainment, if you call being humiliated in a game of Scrabble entertaining.
Have a fine day.
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