MySpace, the final frontier

Did I ever mention how frightful this editing pane is in Blogger? Folks in software discuss two kinds of software. Desktop applications and browser applications. Desktop applications are things you could use if you didn't have a browser. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, and so forth.

These applications are said to be feature-rich. They have good speed (usually), good interaction (usually).

Browser applications, on the other hand, have progressed beyond basic webpages, but not a whole lot. Blogger, for instance, uses this window pane that holds a different amount of text depending on the font you're using. The painful part is that you can't even resize this thing.

Generally speaking, I prefer browser apps, at least, in principle, because it attempts to be a kind of OS that works everywhere. I can be on a Mac or a PC or Unix workstation and expect (more or less) my applications to work. Except I would have thought someone would have come up with a decent language to write apps. Everything used on webpages generally sucks.

But I severely digress.

Because I wanted to talk about MySpace.

Again.

A few days ago, I came to the conclusion that there were many people migrating to MySpace. I'm sure news magazines have come to this conclusion far sooner than me. I had, of course, been puzzled wondering why MySpace was any more successful than, say, Blogger.

I was perusing through some MySpace, well, what do I call it? Blog? Spaces? Well, whatever they are, and began to piece together what makes it successful.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, MySpace's key is linking to friends, and the key to that is putting up a photo.

A few years ago, there was this website called something like amihotornot.com. The website, as I understood it, was something of a joke. You'd put a pic up and let the world decide whether you were hot or not. I suppose it became a way for people to decide whether they liked someone based solely on looks, which, alas, is how many people decide whether they like someone.

Many other sites began to copy this idea, with little variation. However, the sites made the act of seeing and being seen purely reductive. You ranked others. They ranked you. It was, fundamentally, a cheapening act, and yet people didn't seem to mind. Furthermore, that was all it was.

On the other end of the spectrum were blogs. These were sites where the more literary types (yeah, right!) would pontificate on such high-minded topics like whether Bush is good for the country (is that Reggie or Dubs?).

The problem with blogs? It takes a lot of work to keep up. Most people eventually tire of it, and the blog falls into decay. This is especially true, I'd say, for the younger crowd, even if, in the end, they have more time on their hands to maintain a blog.

What blogging services, like Blogger, lacked, was a particularly easy way to link to others, and more than that, to do away with the blog as the centerpiece of interaction.

MySpace is, therefore, a mix of Blogger and amihotornot. It allows people to tell who they are, then link themselves to all their "friends". That would be boring too, except now that people have to put photos up, they try to put something that will attract others. Should they look serious? Like they don't care? Fun? Whatever. They pick a pic that hopefully maximizes other people's interest.

The next step, which is also big, is enough browser real-estate to talk about yourself. This is done, typically, by describing yourself and what kind of person you're looking for. Many people fill out quizzes about themselves, and of course, you can blog about yourself, should you choose to.

The final step is to allow others to comment on you, naturally, with their picture, so you can see who's saying what. Commenting on other people's spaces is convenient because you don't have to write a lot. A short "I miss you so much! We really have to party again!" suffices (oh, I must retch after writing that).

Now, what prevents this from reducing down to a bunch of people you simply don't care about. In reality, I suppose nothing. But, for those involved in it, it becomes a kind of odd competition. Who has the most friends? How savvy are you? Who is the funniest, the quirkiest, the hottest?

And that brings me to the point that has me intrigued. Some people remember high school fondly. Some despised every minute of it. High schools are a story within a story.

On the surface, high schools are schools. They are places of education. People are supposed to learn.

However, the kids attending high schools are adolescents. They're evolving from kids, who like to watch cartoons, play video games, and hang out with their friends (wait, I know a few 20 somethings that this describes...) into adults who are starting to be interested in the opposite (or same) sex, and are beginning to worry about how popular they are or aren't.

Some people rely on their good looks. Others on their witty banter. Others on their brooding. Others are psychotic. Others brainy. The list goes on. But, for a long time, this kind of social Darwinism was primarily confined to the high school itself. Whether you were popular or not rarely mattered to the next high school over.

But things have changed, and we have the net to credit or blame for that. Now that it's relatively easy to post things on the web, and free of charge, once you pay the admission of having a computer and a decent connection to the net.

All of a sudden, your presence is not confined to your physical body, or possibly, phone calls or (egads!) letters sent via snail mail. You can now log into your favorite messenger service (or several!), and people know your virtual presence all day long.

And these days, people aren't shy about letting others know what their lives are all about. They're out eating, clubbing, watching a movie, taking an exam, even snogging.

To understand this mindset, ask yourself whether you do any of this? If you don't, ask yourself, why not? You might be saying to yourself "I don't want people to know what's going on in my life". You don't want to discuss what's up with your girlfriend or your spouse. You don't want to say you covet someone else. You don't want to mention the various pecadilloes you have, or the immature or spiteful thoughts that cross your mind. People don't deserve to know that.

And it's not really strangers you're afraid of, it's the people you know. Strangers, as long as they're content to not contact you, are this nebulous concept of someone "out there". The people you know, on the other hand, are they there because they find your writing style intense, your insights sharp, or are they trying to figure you out, trying to find some weakness, some flaw, some something that will make them giggle with glee because they have something on you.

These are natural fears that prevent people from actually blogging about anything more interesting than the movie they watched last week, but also, it's that people don't want others to know.

For some reason, such fears don't extend to high school (I should extend this to college, because it applies just as well). I suspect it's because, for the most part, people are single and therefore the consequences are less for anything bad they might do. They don't have jobs to worry about. They don't have spouses or kids that might check stuff out.

I suspect MySpace creates a dynamic that's somewhat similar to what you find in high school. There's a bunch of people trying to be accepted by others, except, in this case, on a much larger scale. On the other hand, there are people who'd rather not have a MySpace, because they don't want to compete with their more popular friends.

And the stage is frankly larger now. Rather than popularity in your high school, you can now become popular on a much wider scale. You look at your friends, and your friend's friends, and so forth. And because people are on the Internet, picking up conversations with "strangers" is even easier.

I don't even mean this in the boo-the-Internet-is-scary sort of way. When you head to college, you're meeting new people all the time. Why should it therefore matter that you meet them through MySpace?

And, beyond this brave new world of interaction are television shows like the O.C. (and earlier on Dawson's Creek) which are now shows that appeal to teens, especially teenage women.

Let me think about the shows that were aimed towards me when I was growing up. There were SF shows, like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers. There were shows like Dukes of Hazzard. I knew people who liked Dallas in high school.

But really, this isn't the kind of fare aimed at teens now. Instead, they are now seeing kids their own age. And what do they discover? That they don't match up! Look how devoted everyone is to each other! Look how mean they are!

I generally don't watch any of these shows, but occasionally, there it is in front of me. I'll relate about the only snippet I recall. Dawson is talking to one of his female friends, saying that he had forgotten his friend's birthday. He feels awful, and knows his friend hates him for it, and acknowledges that he is right for hating him for it.

It's this kind of sentiment that reveberates through shows like this. We owe it to our friends to be really, really friends, to think about them, to feel bad when we don't, to confess this to our other friends, who then advise us to make up. I mean, couldn't Dawson have just said "It's just a frickin' birthday!".

And so girls get to complain to guys about why they can't be sensitive like Dawson, who's such a good friend, even when he occasionally messes things up. Concerns that used to be placed on the twenty and thirtysomething set back in the 70s when women said they wanted men to be Alan Alda (sensitive, cries occasionally), instead of John Wayne, are now being pushed on the ten-something crowd.

All this is swirled together, creating more complexities for everyone. These aren't the high school portrayed in Napoleon Dynamite, isolated from the world (yeah, his brother did get on the internet, but it seems so 80s, using texting to communicate).

And the funny thing about MySpace? Nothing seems original. Nearly everything they did has been thought of before. LiveJournal comes closest to what MySpace does, except it centered on blogs. It allowed you to link to friends (but without pix!). It allowed you to comment on blogs (but on a separate page).

Maybe MySpace becomes the new way people communicate, the Google of the next generation. More than likely, something will replace it, but not real soon. I suspect MySpace will ride out maybe 2-3 years longer, and then there may be something out there that will attempt to compete.

This is hard to predict, because instant messengers are about the same as they were ten years ago, with the exception that ICQ, the granddaddy of them all seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. IMs are basically MSN, Yahoo, AIM, with, I suspect, GTalk way behind. And it appears that MySpace also has some chatting service, and if it does, that is just as key to what they are doing, which is encouraging people to link and talk to each other.

Orkut and Friendster tried to do this, with some success, but somehow MySpace seems to have won out.

This would be better and possibly more ironic if I were making this entry in a MySpace account.

But, please. I have my dignity.