The time has finally come, and today I removed my presence on Myspace from the information superhighway. I know that they had ruined the site for everyone, but it was still a reasonably hard thing to decide to do. I have had to wait until I had copied my blog archive over to Blogger for a start, and then there were some photos that weren't saved. But once that was out of the way, I clicked the button, confirmed that I really wanted to do it, and then it was all over. After all the times I had defended it, and attempted to get the Facebook defectors to come back, I had finally had enough.
As I have said before, and will therefore only briefly say again, Myspace will be missed. It was (until only this year when they changed the user's homepage and 'upgraded' to a new look) the best of the social networking websites. There quite simply isn't a replacement for it. Not even Twitter, which has now become the best networking site, and certainly not Facebook.
We all know that Myspace's beginnings were in the music business, as a place for a band or musician to set up a free website and gain a following. That was a unique feature, the fact that you didn't have a Myspace profile, you had a Myspace site. This was your own website to promote your wares, be it music, film, comedy, artwork, or photography and hopefully be able to gain work from it.
Things opened up a bit later on in Myspace's life when members of the public got in on the act. Suddenly the 'social' aspect of the site came into being, and people sent friend requests to people at will. This was the beginning of Myspace's all too brief heyday. It was also the end of it.
Facebook does not have what it takes to take the place of Myspace, due to the lack of control in how you display your profile (profile, not site). On Myspace you could choose your profile song that comes on when someone clicks on to you, you changed your background (do sites like pimp my profile still get any traffic?), and you changed your wording and photographs almost daily. The changing of profile pictures is about the only regularity on Facebook, where every body's profile looks the same. Not that it matters, as nobody looks at your actual profile on Facebook.
Myspace has been losing the battle for a year, and now it would appear that it has also lost the war. The rot set in during 2009, when traffic slowed right down due in part to their arrogant behaviour and disregard for the user. The homepage changed, but you had the option to revert back to the original if you had the patience to navigate the complicated new looks. A simple procedure like changing your profile song suddenly became a challenge to rival anything seen in The Krypton Factor, and people just gave in. Our profile pictures and backgrounds remained the same, because we weren't arsed with changing them around any longer.
The other problem was that Myspace tried too hard to copy Facebook. This made no sense at all, as Myspace was superior in every way. Suddenly we had silly games, 'apps', and all manner of ridiculous distractions. I'm amazed that Tom didn't go the whole way and just introduce throwing sheep.
Fortunately, the decent Myspace 'friends' have kept in touch on Facebook and/or Twitter. I have met people through Myspace and friendships have been made. I also met my girlfriend, the love of my life, through Myspace. Meeting women was something I didn't really want to do again, as my previous experiences of Myspace dating were disastrous. People can appear interesting online, and create a false life for themselves. These people fall on their faces when it comes to meeting other people, as it turns out that they are actually quite boring.
So like Friends Reunited before it, Myspace has now bitten the dust. Friends Reunited was a good idea at the time, but in the wrong time. The term 'social networking' hadn't been coined when Friends Reunited was launched. The other problem of course was that the Internet was a very different place way back then.
So farewell Myspace, and thanks for the add!
