Facebook Ban - Myspace Renegades

Ah, Myspace. What happened? Where did you go wrong and have all of us turn our backs on you? How fickle the heart of the social networking society is! I am one of these renegades. I am not sorry.

To be honest, I have spent the past 20 minutes trying to figure out my old login information to get onto my Myspace account. I know I come from a generation enthralled with various substances that do not promote good memory function, but I'm not THAT bad. I should remember this. Has it been that long?

Before I delve into the innards that is Myspace and the advent of Facebook (at least in my life) please note that my source is my weak memory. I am not getting any of this information from The Social Network movie (haven't seen it. Still refuse to.), or anywhere else. So this is my renegade story as I recall it, where I turned my back on Myspace and went to the dark side...

I unfortunately have been scouring both Facebook and Myspace to find the dates that I made each profile, but I can't find this information so here's the ballpark: 17. I was around the age of 17 when I made my Myspace profile. The great thing about Myspace was that it had everything all in one. Each profile had a blog, you could make music profiles for your budding rock band, you could customize your profile to the point where it doesn't even look like a Myspace page anymore... anything. You didn't have to put your own name on your profile. All my friends had "Myspace names." "Stephanie Spins", "Hot Mess", and "Flawless" were all good friends of mine on Myspace. I was "Little Bird". I still am. This persona Myspace allowed you to create would bleed into real life: we actually referred to each other by our Myspace names, we knew the Myspace celebrities (Tila Tequila, Jeffery Starr, etc.) and talked about them IRL ("in real life"). Myspace was a huge deal back then, so what happened?

When Facebook started, I refused to join. First of all, before you could even do anything on Facebook you had to enter your University. It was primarily a University networking tool then, and they hadn't added my Canadian prairie alma mater to the list yet. Everyone was bugging me to try this new "Facebook" thing, Myspace was so passe! So eventually they relaxed the university restrictions (or added my university to the list... I can't remember and it's unimportant), and I created a profile. There were a few things I didn't like. By a few things I mean everything. What do you mean you can't customize the backgrounds on your profile? There's no blog? There's nothing that remotely resembles a blog? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVE TO USE YOUR REAL NAME?!

GARBAGE. This new website was absolute garbage in my educated 20 year old opinion.

But then.... it happened. Someone really dropped the ball over at Myspace. Viruses and hackers riddled the site, pop up ads, and glitches were everywhere. Myspace stopped working for the people. After a few months of dealing with this frustration, while Facebook was busy tweaking and improving their site, we gave up. Myspace's darlings felt scorned and forgotten. Slowly we started trickling back to our barren Facebook profiles. We learned how to use the "wall" and the "pokes" and how to add all your friends. Facebook was less creative yes, but we were getting the hang of things and at least it didn't crash on us? The momentum picked up and soon our myspace profiles were left to gather dust in some forgotten corner of the internet.

That's how it happened. The great internet migration from Myspace to Facebook. Now Myspace has completely switched their concept in order to not be rendered obsolete. They've focused on the music aspect of the site, which is a good plan as Facebook still doesn't support music players on profiles. So maybe Myspace won't be laid to rest just yet, but it is on the brink of internet death. They've accepted defeat and even provide links to Facebook right on their home page. How sad:

Facebook has officially usurped the title of supreme ruler of our internet and our lives. I don't think anyone minds.

(post script: I am STILL trying to log onto my Myspace profile. ugh.)

Facebook Ban - Pro Facebook

For the amount of negative insights I have into Facebook there is a reason we all use it so often. It is a great tool for connecting with friends, staying in touch with people, and networking. It's also a great marketing and public relations tool for any type of business, from the new to the old. Facebook is a free way for you to get the word of your start-up business out into the public, and to keep people updated on various things you're doing with that business.

As of 2010, Facebook had over 400 million active users, with the average user spending 55 minutes per day on Facebook. Clearly it's a tool that's being used, and in high volumes on a regular basis. To be able to tap into this network and effectively use it to your advantage is a great use of resources.

On Facebook, you can create a "page" specifically for your business or project. More than 20 million people become fans of pages a day. It's an effective way to reach a lot of people with minimal effort. When you update the page, each fan gets a notification automatically letting them know of the change. Letting possibly hundreds, to thousands of people know what your company is up to with a click of a button for FREE is amazing.

You can also create event pages. With an event page you can send invitations to hundreds of people in a matter of minutes. They RSVP, which gives you a general idea of the numbers of people who would be attending, as well as can write on the wall about the event. This is a great way to field any questions regarding the event, and let them know any changes in venue or time. Facebook automatically has a reminder in the top corner of the event for anyone who RSVP'd that they would attend as well.

Facebook chat is another element of the website I love. It allows you to see who of your friends is online and lets you chat in real time with them while still navigating the site freely. I use the chat to stay in touch with my friends from out of town mostly. If you were not interested in letting people see that you are online, the chat allows you to appear as offline, so as to not get any chat requests.

I've mentioned the newsfeed several times in this blog, but it really is the pièce de résistance of Facebook. It is on the homepage, and is updated constantly with anything your friends are doing. Status changes, photo uploads, wall posts... everything. You can customize the newsfeed, letting Facebook know what type of things you want to see (more photos over status changes for example), and who's information you don't want to see updated. It's a great and quick way to get snippets of information on a lot of different people in a very short amount of time.

So as you can see, Facebook is not all that bad. It is a great tool when used to it's full potential. Take out the psychological warfare and use it for what it was initially meant for: networking.