Geek Moment of the Day! The Return of Myspace

August 11, 2011


Hey everyone! This is the first geek moment of the day, and I think it's interesting. Do you all remember MySpace? No? Oh. Well, a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away Facebook was only a gleam in the eye of Mark Zuckerberg, and Friendster was kind of a piece of crap. So, Myspace did the job. One of the first big modern social networks it allowed users to create personal profile pages, and add friends and pictures. One thing that was pretty cool about it was you could put music tracks right on your home page, and they would play whenever someone visited it. Yes this became very annoying because some people liked to have friggin loud as hell music blast your ears off. You know who you are! Even Facebook doesn't allow that, or anything close to the personal profile pages Myspace did.

Sadly, that's all Myspace really did right. There was no way to find out what your friends were doing without visiting their site, or subscribing to a special blog feature that was available. The only way to talk to your friends on the site was to post directly on their page, just like with Facebook's Wall. Myspace was originally created so small independent musical artists could post their own music to the site, and fans could interact with them, and each other. Which is a really cool idea. However, again this feature was made less amazing when Facebook increased their abilities. The increase in personal features, and the fact that you could see what friends were doing just by looking at the stream made Facebook the place to be. Plus, it was about a million times easier to find someone. You see, on Myspace you had usernames. You could pick your real name, but who does that? So, if you wanted to be friends on Myspace, they had to send you the link to their page. On Facebook, you just get out your stalker hat, and you were in.

With all that said...MYSPACE IS BACK! OK, they never really went away. I hadn't logged on to my page for about 3 years, but apparently it's been running this whole time. Go check it out, it looks very different. The profile pages now look a lot like Google+, and the front page is all about music again. Some new features include a Google+ style stream that lets to filter things you want, new music, and a much easier layout for communicating with friends. My favorite feature is that if you don't have an account, you can set one up...THROUGH FACEBOOK! To me, that would be like Apple saying, "If you don't want to buy a Mac that's okay, but if you buy a PC we'll put a sticker on it that says 'Apple'". They also seem to have a playlist feature where you can add any media you want.  I'm not really sure of the purpose of that, I mean if I want to listen to music I'm going to get my iPhone, or listen on iTunes if I really so desire.

I doubt I will do anything on Myspace. I am on Twitter and Facebook pretty much all day, and I'm already registered for Google+. Three Social Networks is about three too many Social Networks so I think Myspace will stay on the back burner. But, I do suggest checking it out. You never know, in 5 years people may be talking about the epic return of Facebook, and how will it ever compete with the powerful Myspace!

If you want to be my friend on Myspace, here is my profile:
http://www.myspace.com/jospiv

Go for it, and see all the strange things I put on that site. 2007 was a wild time.