So as part of my attempt to expand my worldwide writing empire, I'm now on both major social networking sites. Right now I'm kind of obsessed with facebook because it's new. Well, and for other reasons too, which I'll enumerate below.
Both services are essentially about people under 25 getting laid. Facebook puts a much more polite face on this, except when you get a request for details on a friend request, and one checkbox says, "we hooked up once." Ick! Whether you prefer your sleaze up front or just below the surface will probably determine which site you prefer. I'm still on the fence about this. I do like the fact that on Facebook I don't get all kinds of fake friend requests from people promoting porn sites. But for my own ulterior motives--which, let's be clear, involve promoting my books, I'm a happily married man thank you very much--Myspace does work a little better. It's easy for me to search myspace for people who've mentioned my books and add them as friends. Most people are used to this kind of treatment, and of all the blind friend requests I've sent on myspace, I've only gotten two hostile responses. One guy yelled at me in all caps, and I sent back something about how he clearly had a defective keyboard. And one woman sent this message: "Looooooser!" Somehow I fought back the urge to send back, "biiiiiitch!". Anyway, it seems pretty accepted that lots of people are using myspace for self-promotional reasons, so it's an acceptable part of the culture of that site. Whereas on facebook, there seems to be an expectation that you're only befriending people you've actuallly met. Or, you know, "hooked up with". Ecch. For some reason that just skeezes me out every time I see it there. Which I guess means I prefer my sleaze out in the open instead of in a pop-up box on an otherwise polite site.
Having said that, if I'm looking for a specific person, like, say, a former student (most of my friends on both sites are former students), I like the fact that facebook allows me to actually see their real name, instead of looking at some grainy cell phone picture of someone calling themselves "Numba One Playa 07" or something and trying to figure out if that's someone I actually knew 10 years ago.
Facebook doesn't allow the kind of profile customization that myspace allows. My take on this is that most people on myspace think that other people's customization is tacky and their own is cool. As for me, I don't know squat about what looks good, and I customized my myspace profile so I could fit in with the cool kids. I do like the music part, though. Right now anybody clicking on my myspace profile gets to hear the Carrie Nations' "Find It." (Used so effectively in the movie "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" to represent their lost innocence...ah, will they ever be able to "find it" again? Not if two-thirds of the band gets murdered, they won't!). Ahem. How will I educate people about the genius of the Carrie Nations on facebook?
Right now there are fewer TMI surveys coming through on my facebook profile. People do all these surveys on myspace and send them to all their friends, and I usually don't read them, but sometimes I do, and I usually end up finding things out about them that I really didn't want to know. (Call me old-fashioned, but I just think there are certain things a teacher, even a former teacher, shouldn't know about a student, even a former student who's well into legal adulthood.)
Facebook consolidates information about what all your friends are doing, so you can waste time on facebook much more effectively than myspace.
Here, though, is what I really like about facebook: since it's newer, and not as big, I get to be one of the people that ruins it! Probably people are already bitching about how facebook used to be cool until certain people discovered it--and I'm one of those certain people! I get to be the uncool old person that ruins facebook for the cool kids! How cool is that?
