MySpace has been the bane of my existance, both personally and professionally. It’s the one social notworking site I absolutely refuse to have anything to do with. I find the site to be an assault on the eyes and ears, between music that plays automatically and the bad design habits its denizens subscribe to. For a brief while at the office, I actually had to do some work on our MySpace site; afterward, I gladly renounced any responsibility for it.

I’m not alone in my disgust with the site. A few people I know have MySpace accounts and are growing fed up with the service for various reasons. To my knowledge, though, none have gone so far as to start a movement to get people to delete their accounts. MySpace user Simon Owen did, and he’s encouraging people to follow his lead on January 30, International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. Simon even listed ten reasons why he’s deleting his account. Among them:

• You rarely log in to Myspace except to delete spam friend requests from nude webcam girls.
• 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.

And my personal favorite:

• 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.

I don’t have a MySpace account (see first paragraph), but I’m totally there in spirit. Now, perhaps someone should start a movement to rid the world of useless facebook applications.

(via Mashable)

These are my links for 26 Jun:

• Do you have to be gay to tell another guy his eyes are pretty? (Salon Life) - My gaydar says my good-looking co-worker is gay, but he pretends otherwise.
• At Yahoo, being paranoid comes with the job (CNET News.com) - To Arturo Bejar, the name of Yahoo’s security team made perfect sense when he came up with it eight years ago: the “Paranoids.”
• Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles - Salon - Tech researcher danah boyd explains the chief cultural differences between two uber-popular young people’s social networks.

While piddling over at Iconbuffet the other day, I came upon a forum post about Virb, yet another social networking site akin to MySpace (Or social notworking considering how much time people seem to spend on these sites!).

That’s where the similarity ends, though. Virb’s interface and design is infinitely cleaner. You get more control over your page’s appearance. And there’s no obnoxious animated banner ad at the top of the page; advertising — powered by Google’s AdSense — is placed near the bottom.

For a while, I refused to join any new social notworking site — MySpace in particular — because there are just too many out there, and the interfaces are usually just too clunky. Virb changed my stance — it was too sexy for me to resist. Find me there at virb.com/fredosan.

Time Magazine offers up an article on twitter, which deems it MySpace’s successor. Whatever — though now I know John Edwards’ campaign makes use of it.

On a visit to a local bookstore this afternoon, I spotted three copies of “MySpace for Dummies” in the computer section. Someone’s being ironic!

(Incidentally, it looks like someone at the bookstore could use a copy of “Alphabetizing for Dummies”; the shelf is supposed to be organized by title. “Mac OS X: The Missing Manual” would come before “Macromedia Studio MX 2004 for Dummies.”)