Oct 25, 2006
myspace and you
here’s the deal with web2.0, there’s no doubt about its success being a function of online social interaction – there are a million articles written every day about it. despite its cult-of-buzz and despite its near-spontaneous creation by the web’s most influential person nobody’s heard of, tim o’reilly (unless you read wired magazine, itself a real springboard for everything web2.0) there definitely is something about web2.0 that interests and (*gasp*) excites people like me. this blog and wordpress are a testament to that.
so yay for web2.0 …
backtrack a little, who remembers the early days’ attempts at social networking through personal sites? geocities? angelfire? tripod? they had ‘communities’ and ‘neighbourhoods’ and all that other crap. and, most importantly, and especially compared to the elegance with which more and more websites are being designed, they were UGLY. music would just spontaneously start playing (not REAL music, but the most hideous thing ever to pretend to be music: MIDI!), images would cover so much real estate as to require sidescrolling, get stretched to infinity, distorted, barely fit inside borders, grouped between random spurts of retarded text, yada yada yada. nothing had come out before or after with such a haphazard attempt at aesthetic design … until myspace showed up.
to say myspace has “showed up” is a gross understatement, this shit’s virtually taken over and i don’t even know what the fuck makes it so special.
here’s an excerpt from an angry email i wrote earlier today which provided a link to a myspace profile page:
“jesus christ, i can’t even scroll down this page. look, here’s the deal with webpages, unless it’s a fucking photo-essay I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SIDESCROLL to view the content. if the internet were a comedy club, myspace would be amateur hour and people would vomit. i don’t hate gay people, but myspace is a fag.”
if you’re reading this (there’s only two of you anyway) and wondering: “how come waleed, handsome devil that he is, hasn’t linked to myspace at all?” well, cause it sucks. if you don’t know what myspace looks like, i envy you like i envy young children and i’d rather not be the one who rips that innocence away from you.
i hate myspace. i’d rather not live in a world whose future is myspace.
