~Schweinkenstein

First, the article that inspired the rant below. Or later if you are kind enough to read my unqualified drivel first.



Even though I intend to use Myspace as an internal Gateway to my content that can be directed elsewhere, I will be using less popular Spam 2.0 profiles. I suppose this is also part of the Spam 2.0 scheme but if myspace is going to be horded with this many advertisements and slowness and unwarranted unwanted crap, I might as well use other profile sites that I could rely on more readily than myspace.



This is Spinchat syndrome if you ask me. There are a lot of problems on myspace when it comes to browser compatibility, interface, and then there's that wonderful frequent "Ha Ha! An Error has Occurred, but don't worry, The Super Duper Myspace Team has Forwarded it" message. Yet the only thing that they fix and focus on is.. how do we make money, how do we get more users and how can we be awesome and cool with dumb asses. Which in conjunction is just fine Making Money and Expanding the Market is necessary, but solely? No. They've done it to such a degree where quality, control and efficiency gets flushed down the toilet. I say Nay Nay. This may lead to their demise, but then I bet they rank in a lot of dough to where there may never be a significant enough of a decline and then there is the fact that almost everyone you know online, has a myspace profile. Perhaps it will be a personal demise for the lot of us instead.



I think I joined this service just around when Myspace started to show very clear symptoms of Spinchat Syndrome. There was still an illusion that this was a social networking website. Don't get me wrong, that function on myspace still exists, HOWEVER! The e-mails from strangers have rapidly declined upon first joining here, and with this decline came an exponential growth of crap profiles and crap e-mails. That's the way this Cookie Crumbles I suppose, yet a lot of people wouldn't mind eating the crumbs that remain and then they'd ask for more. Especially when "tricking out" your myspace has become such a demand that I bet you can train a parrot to add obnoxious music videos to your myspace page.



I felt very turned off when myspace became a household name. I don't know where I can pin-point the time that happened, but, this wave of common-myspace-knowledge seemed to be over night. Movies and Comedians and Musicians and TV shows and what have you now use Myspace as their primary host for official online reference. That's just gross. Come on.



Hah, I'd like to hear a Movie Studio complain, "We're loosing so much money from 'ILLEGAL' DOWNLOADING! (ominous thunder clash and echo) that now a days we've stooped so low in finances that we have to use Myspace profiles instead of real websites." And then after the quote they receive millions of dollars for making such a statement by sound bites and such. Ah well, I'll still check around on my myspace account but I sure as hell won't go out looking for anything here anymore.



I can't tell you how spicy and prickly the taste of stomach acid was when someone contacted me elsewhere and said "You know what you need? You need a myspace." I couldn't hold in the vomitous outrage. In a condition reflex I react with a bold and significant "Byeuch!", and then told them, "Yes.. I have one of those." The Myspace charm is totally gone with me. I much prefer it when people ask me about my livejournal, deviantart or my last.fm account before they ask for any damned myspace account. Thankfully, I still believe in an independent primary source of online content for myself as, whatever it is I do and haven't done yet. Maybe I can still use myspace as a gateway function before personal gain turns into a form of spam that gets eliminated.



~Schweinkenstein, Von Hog, Tommy Tom Tom, and whatever other alias I may have.



P.S. For those who don't know. Spinchat is a self-suppressive and user-interactivity-suppressive chat service. It began as a test for an ICQ clone and then turned into a chat site using Java interactivity and client programs. As the years went by, many of the original functions of Spinchat were stripped away either by content distortion or the function becoming only available to those who pay. All of the users and content that originally made Spinchat a fun and unique place now cease to exist due to it's self-destruction in attempts to gain new users and earn money while leaving the chat-site broken, deliberately. Similar Mentality exists but I coin this phrase for online services whose model, original functions and reasons for serving users radically changes for the worse.



Critique is Welcome.