MySpace

I can't make my mind up whether MySpace is a good thing or not. I mean, I can look in on my friends occasionally and see what they've been up to, and find out where my favourite bands are playing. I get invitations to parties and nights out and stuff like that, and I think that's ace.

However, there are a couple of things that drive me mad about MySpace. First of all there's the people who only want to be my friend so that they can send me their spam, nude photos (yawn) and so that they can say "look how many MySpace friends I have". Get a life! Oh yeah, and if you want to send me nude photos, I'd prefer them to be of sexy blokes with decent bods, not skinny girls, cos they just don't do anything for me, OK? Bruce Dickinson or James Hetfield would be fine examples, or even Jon Bon Jovi, but lay off the anorexic bints with chests like xylophones, willya?

Then there's those 'Spaces' that play music automatically when you open the page. I use Firefox and I'm in the habit of having several pages open at once, so when you've got 5 different tunes all competing for your eardrums at the same time, it's not nice. Most of the time, I have my sound on mute. However, I have discovered some rather excellent bands through MySpace, like Winterstrain and the Deathstars. So, I'm just going to have to put up with it.

Backgrounds - they can be really nice, but some people have such garish backgrounds to their MySpace pages, that you can't actually read the text. Quit it!

The other thing that pisses me off is the bulletin board. I only log into MySpace about once a week, sometimes less frequently than that, and each time I go in there, there's a huge pile of bulletins and most of them are utter shite. OK, so let's deal with these in turn:

No, I won't repost your bulletin about false friends. I get at least one of these messages every week. If you think that, by reposting your message and spamming my friends, it proves to you that I'm your friend, you're wrong. My friends are real people. I meet them in person and we take the piss out of each other, get drunk together, help each other out and generally have a spiffingly good time. I also have friends who live further away, and regular visits are not practical, but we keep in touch by phoning each other, chatting online and occasionally making the effort to meet up somewhere halfway. Friends are not judged by their ability to repost spam on bulletin boards.

Then there's the bulletins in the form 'fill in the answers to these dumb questions' and spam all your mates with them. These just get deleted. They're for vacuous people who have no life. If you really want to find out who I fancy, ask me directly and I'll probably tell you. Generally, when I fancy someone, they'll know about it, and just because I fancy someone, doesn't mean that I'm after them. I'm perfectly happy with my current slave, thanks very much.

Not all of the bulletin messages are bad, though. For example, they've been a great network for publicising gigs. parties and general get-togethers. There's a message out there at the moment asking people to keep an eye out for some stuff a band had stolen and yes, I've reposted that, because it's worth it.

So, do I block the people who are constantly posting shite in the bulletin board, and risk offending them, or do I put up with it and just ignore their posts?

Maybe I'll just turn off the PC and go and ride my bike instead.