Reasons to like MySpace

MySpace is a part of my every day web browsing. I didn't plan that. I didn't intend for that to happen. I didn't want that to happen. It just did. More and more people that I knew set up profiles on it and I kept checking them. A couple people that I have the unhealthy desire to "stalk" have profiles there. It became something I check regularly.

Which sucks.

It sucks because MySpace itself sucks. It's slow. It's antiquated. It breaks often. There's spammers and phishers all over it. It's music player blares when you don't want it to. User profiles can be customized by jamming HTML and CSS inside the body of their profiles, which makes the pages various states of crappy, full of ads, and a bear for the browser to render. You can't see who's updated their profile recently, so you have to check yourself. "Bulletins" come in that are really just your "friends'" excuses to mass-mail you stupid quizzes and junk that you feel obligated to click on for no other reason but because "it's there." Your "friends" sometime post things on your page that make everything stop lining up -- and it's normally a somewhat crude or idiotic picture or advertisement you don't care about. Tables! So help me God, Tables! Tables were supposedly kicked out three or four years ago! Nested tables! What is this? The never-going-anywhere implementation of fatdog!?

But there are actually a few really cool things about MySpace.

• I can rank my friends. If I was a parent, I'd even rank my kids on this thing.
• I can show off what cool, alternative, and indie bands I'm friends with so everyone will know how much cooler than them I am.
• I can use it to play Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" while I'm at work without actually committing to putting on my iTunes playlist. That way no one really can confirm that I like it as much as I do.
• I can confirm daily how much better I am than the people that made it.
• I can confirm daily how shitty I feel that I didn't get rich of such a poor and crappy implementation of a good idea and that "Tom" did instead.

So it's not all blinking text, animated GIFs, embedded videos, and sluggish page loading. Some of it's really great.