Last night Es and I were invited to spend time at Eric’s place with some other friends and it was really enjoyable. Good company, good people, family really.  I had a wonderful time and so did Es so thanks Eric, Becca and Drake for the lovely evening.

This morning I checked my messages and found out that I had set off a few fireworks by my decision to setup and actually use a MySpace account yesterday.   This was surprising to me.  I would like to take this opportunity to explain why I suddenly decided to do this.

First, I used to use social networking sites before they were called that.  I was an old skool LiveJournal user, for one thing, with an account dating back about 7 years.  Before that I used DiaryLand.  Before that I participated in other Internet forums extensively on Yahoo, MP3.com, Usenet, and even AOL and CompuServe back in the pre-web days.  I am not a newbie to online community, rather, I have been involved in one way or another with online communities for about 13 years. 

However, the new crop of social networking sites (MySpace, FaceBook, etc) have not appealed to me for a number of reasons.  First, the mode of communication is difficult, pointless and redundant.  MySpace messaging is nothing more than clumsy and poorly implemented email.  MySpace comments are fairly pointless compared to comments in LiveJournal because they aren’t in response to anything, as comments in response to a post are.  FaceBook apps that let you spank, taze, gift, or hug somebody are ridiculously lame and do nothing for me.   I already have a space, it’s called RyanSutter.net, where I can blog.  I already have email for messages.  I have IM for instant messaging.  Redundant, redundant, redundant.  In short, these sites have little to offer practically speaking except a horrible user interface with lame or redundant services and incredibly intrusive advertising.

So, why have I set one of these sites up?  I think it’s because I’ve finally reached some sort of critical mass in my life of friends who use such services to make it useful again.  If MySpace offered no utility to me, I would never use it, but it’s reached a point where there is something potentially useful there because my social network in the real world has finally managed to become viable and many of those people are users of these sites.

See, the only reason an ancient Netizen like me left the online social space in the first place was because I lost nearly all my social connections in the real world, got removed from “the scene” and bowed out of them about 4 years ago.  LJ went away as the cool spot to be, to be replaced by the atrocious MySpace, which was then superseded by FaceBook to such an extent that MySpace in turn improved their service to make it at least tolerable.  I wish we were still living in the LJ era myself and that my return to the online social world was somewhere other than MySpace or FaceBook, but now that an online social network presence has some practical utility in my life I gotta go where my friends are and those are the sites.  I picked MySpace over FaceBook because their both lame but my band is already on MySpace so I already have a network there.

So, yeah, I have a MySpace now and I will now resume participation in cyberspace.  http://www.myspace.com/ryansutter  Whoop de ding.

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