MySpace, ByeSpace, ThySpace, BuySpace

So, the WSJ article. The life and death of an idea. OK, I'm being a bit severe, but I'm listening to some fab, bippy-hoppy, electronica right now from Eric Amarillo. I'm just dancing in my chair while I write this. How does electrified happiness translate into the demise of social networking sites? It doesn't. I just wanted to include a little something from my life. Because I want you to know me. ME. I want you to rank me, file me, serial number me. I want you to judge me. Based solely on my music choices. Or how many friends I have on Friendster. Or how good my package looks in my flak suit as I suit up to fly a plane. [That's a bit of an obscure reference, I think. Did they actually let him fly it? Dumbass.] I must say this peppy amalgam of sound is extremely repetitive. Like EXTREMELY. But it's like the best eight bars of the peppiest tune. Over and over. So you keep getting excited again and again. Now, Air just came on. Totally different feel. OK, back to life and death.

Vauhini Vara is a size queen. She laments the unwieldiness of MySpace. She discusses the infection of social networking sites by greedy advertisers. (Is there anything, anything at all, that doesn't have advertising attached to it these days? Does Cheetos sponsor everything? Is everything "brought to you by" one of the zillions of Johnson & Johnson products? It is a sad, sad day.) Vara quotes Judit Nagy, VP of Consumer Insights at Fox Interactive Media as saying that MySpace is "moving from a growth spurt into a phase of maturity." Isn't it a bit to early to use the term "maturity"? We talked about this a tiny bit last night. Or at least Colin tried to get us to talk about it. Where are we going with all this? What is the future of social networking? Can we even answer that question now? Isn't it still too early for predictions? The co-option of SNS by advertisers may drive them to an early grave at this rate.

In my ponderings over the separation between one's online identity and one's real identity, I found this in Vara's article. She talks about a fella who chose to terminate his account with MySpace because of the porn spamming. This is how she phrased it:

"Last spring, Mr. Kalyn killed his MySpace profile."

KILLED? Yikes #3. This plays along with my aghastness (aghasticity?) at MonkeyPuppy's blurring of the me/my profile lines. Colin always asks, "Are we our blogs? Do we write them or do they write us?"

Our very own JoeyDee has some ideas for computer cryogenics that might answer the question.