Facebook Vs. Myspace

I was on Team Facebook before the Poke Me and I Facebooked Your Mom t-shirts started appearing on campuses. I had an account when it was an almost featureless college-only networker. It’s not impressive when you know my secret plan. As soon as my friends, you know those people who are bigger nerds than I am, tell me about a new networker, I sign up for the brand-new site, then abandon the profile until the site’s bug-free and feature-full. I made early-adopter profiles on Orkut, LiveJournal, Comsummating, Friendster, and the less well-known sites like Spokeo and Gaah, as well as several dozen hot new things that don’t exist anymore. When Spokeo and Gaah get out of beta? You heard it here first.

I’m not entirely proud of it, but at least I can definitively describe MySpace as the worst social networker ever. It’s like the AOL of networkers. So easy to use, no wonder everyone using it is a moron.

Or is it so easy to use? A quick look at MySpace pages reminds me that HTML is hard, and frames should only be used in the hands of a trained professional.

That same quick look reminded me that I should be out buying albums of bands I’d never heard of, but who want to be MyFriends! Or buying DVDs! Or downloading new rings for my cellphone! Or wallpapers for my PC! Or any of the other bazillion things in the ads that almost entirely obscure what little content there is.

Facebook also takes conspicuous consumption to heart. Facebookers can spam their friends with the same YouTube clips that MySpaceCadets can. And, you join groups. There’s a group for every band, TV show, location, clique and sub-sub-subculture’s obscure injoke. I’m partial to “I just tried to ford the river and my fucking oxen died” personally.

Maybe I don’t hate YouTube and MySpace as much as I hate that a capital letter in the middle of fairly lame compound word is suddenly hip. Please, let this go the way of the mid-word @.

Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg? Your next feature should be a “Member Since…” stat so I could show everyone that I was on Facebook first.