Title:	MySpace Sucks (and so does Friendster. And Orkut. And FaceParty. And ...)
Date:	September 21, 2006
Self Righteous:	2
Opinionated:	3
Simply true:	8

MySpace has some interesting uses to it. I appreciate that. But I hate the way people are using. And MySpace could help make it a better place to be.

First of all, I wish MySpace would give me the ability to block unwanted friend requests from non-friends.

See - it would be real easy. Just give me settings so that I can block requests from:

1) Bands
2) Events
3) People who already have more than 600 friends. None of my actual friends are that popular.
4) Women in russia who created their account in the last 24 hours and send contacts using the words "new friends" and "america"

Wouldn't that be grand?

Call me a grumpy old myspace user, but myspace is supposed to be a friend relational database. I don't need a band relational database. I can look at my CD collection for that. And can someone tell me how an event can be a friend?

Me: So, Rhythmic Arts Festival, what have you been up to? Rhythmic Arts Festival: Ummm.. I'm an event. Me: How's the wife? The kids?.. Rhythmic Arts Festival: Yea. Still an event.

So - would it kill myspace to allow me to filter these (non-)people out?

And while I don't have 600 friends, I do have more than 30. So my friends are listed over multiple pages. If I want to find my buddy "Steve," I have to browse through a few slow-loading pages of randomly sorted friends, hopefully remembering that "Steve" is called "A little piece of heaven" on MySpace. Would it kill MySpace to give me a pure text listing of all my friends just showing stats such as NAME, age, location and maybe email?

I would have posted this on my MySpace blog, but the MySpace advanced editor doesn't work on: Opera, Safari, [fill in any of the many browsers Dave uses here], and the MySpace basic editor is broken.

That's comedy, since I don't generally use the MySpace blog. I have my own, and it's yet another of of MySpace's attempts to be every tool in my life. Like email. I don't want to read my email on a website. I process it on my server, where I can save and maintain all my email. Can I get MySpace to forward MySpace "email" to my actual email account? Not a chance.

Heck, MySpace gave up on trying to email me about new messages and new friend requests long ago. It's not going to my spam server, I'm smart enough to check that. Perhaps they've noticed my seething contempt when I have to login to their website to communicate with my "friends."

Speaking of not mailing me, Friendster decided to stop emailing me as well. Remember Friendster? That's the website that MySpace blatantly ripped off and made millions from. Interesting. Not that Friendster should get the credit, remember SixDigrees.com? No? Nobody does. SixDegrees was doing what Friendster did a couple of years earlier. Sometimes it sucks to be the inventor, SixDegrees got a whole lot of nothing.

I envision a replacement for all of these - a real friends relational database that lets you categorize and organize your contacts/friends/coworkers and general people relationships. And you can use a web interface to connect to it, or applications on your machine. Oh, what a happy day that would be.

Okay, Grumpy-Old-Man mode is now turned off, you may return to your previously scheduled programming.