OK, I’ve gone and done it. I have a MySpace account. I’ve actually had one for a few months now, but I never really did anything with it. I didn’t know anyone using it nor did I feel like taking the time to learn how it worked, what was there, etc.
However, that’s starting to change, as I’ve discovered many of the peeps I hang with at work have MySpace accounts. I’m still not sure how much I’ll actually use it, but I figured it would be a cool way to kind stay connected with people I know. Plus, some of the groups look potentially interesting (I’ve only looked at photography-based ones so far).
Of course, as with most social networking tools, how good it is is highly dependent on how frequently your own network actually uses it. I remember using Friendster way back in the day, and it was kind of cool when it wasn’t crashing my browser or lagging out completely. I stuck with it for quite some time, because I actually knew people using it (current and former students at the time, friends I knew from college, etc.). However, as people have moved on to other things, my Friendster usage pretty much died a quick death.
I’m sort of seeing MySpace as much the same thing. It’s performance isn’t too bad in general, but I do get periods where it is slower than molasses. Functionality is relatively straightforward. Feature set is decent. And it looks like there’s an insanely huge community for anything under the sun out there. However, the main appeal for me right now is actually knowing people in real life who use it. My contact list is pretty pathetic right now (I only started adding people this week), but I hope to expand it in the future.
I’m not really certain how much time I want to invest in MySpace. I’m thoroughly addicted to Flickr, and that sucks up a huge amount of headspace and attention. I also spend a lot of time working on my blog. Adding another social networking community complete with its own blogging system could be another huge time-suck that I probably shouldn’t get into right now. But I’ll give it a shot and see how it goes. I just might have a good time playing around with it.
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