Top 5 Reasons that I Prefer Facebook to Myspace

Now, this topic may seem a bit esoteric for my older readers, so I’m going to try to explain the greater concepts of Myspace and Facebook in order to make my arguments more comprehensible. Facebook and Myspace are free internet sites that allow users to create profiles in which they describe or post photos of themselves, and then contact other people with similar profiles, who then become their “friends”. Basically, to become someone’s friend on one of these sites, you “friend” them — i.e. you send them a friendship request, which they then either accept or deny. Some users accrue ludicrous numbers of friends in this manner, because even if someone only vaguely knows you, he would still feel that he is being rude if he were to deny your request for friendship. Once two people are friends, they can send each other messages, share contact information, get reminders about each other’s birthdays, etc. It is actually a very convenient way to get in contact with people who live far away, or whom you haven’t seen in a long time. I even used Myspace to get in contact with a friend that I hadn’t seen since I was 9 years old, and arranged a meeting with him in London this year (as recounted in “Top 5 things about my trip to England”). While I use both sites, I tend to overwhelmingly prefer Facebook. I have something like 12 Myspace friends, and over 300 Facebook friends. I check Facebook every day, and Myspace maybe once or twice a week. Here are the reasons why:

-5. The Anti-Reasons

I realize that in many ways, Myspace is a superior site to Facebook. Profiles on myspace are infinitely more customizable than those of facebook. On Myspace, you have a great deal of control over the “look” and “feel” of your profile, not just the information and photos you post about yourself. You can include non-photo media, such as music, which is a great way for aspiring artists to put their new material out there for the world to hear. Sure, Facebook’s cookie-cutter profiles might be considered more “user friendly”, like Windows XP over Linux, but generally things that are “user friendly” are designed to be limiting in order to prevent stupid people from messing them up. If you have any programming knowledge, or desire to be independently creative, Myspace is a much better fit for you than Facebook. Facebook, at its roots, was also very exclusive. You initially had to have a university email address from one of the schools on the Facebook network in order to become a member. Facebook is now available to pretty much anyone, but it started off as kind of a inner-circle, holier-than-thou, cool-kid phenomenon, which I find kind of irritating. So, really, if Facebook weren’t way better than Myspace, I would clearly prefer Myspace. So why is Facebook better? Let’s see…

4. I started using Facebook first

There is something to be said for being the first to do something. Why do we all remember Neil Armstrong, and denounce Buzz Aldrin as a giant tool? Well, maybe that’s exaggerating, but you get my point. I don’t know whether Facebook or Myspace was the first to coin the “profile” and “friend” concepts, but Facebook is the one that I started using first, so for all intents and purposes it was first to the finish line. Once you have one site that allows you to get into contact with far away friends, and make meaningless, empty contact with hundreds or thousands of others, having a second site to serve the same purpose seems a little unnecessary. Myspace was unfortunate enough to arrive second, and thus they are obsolete, and dead to me.

3. Tom just doesn’t do it for me.

Who is this guy? I know he’s the creator of Myspace, but why is he automatically my friend, and the friend of everyone on the site? I don’t feel any closer to Tom because I see his goofy picture in a plain white t-shirt every time that I look at my group of friends. I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me. All I know is that he created a website, has a very plain white t-shirt, and kind of a creepy smile. He has 166911512 friends! (and counting, I suppose). Who needs that many friends? No one. I guess maybe for him, getting to be everyone’s friend is like a finder’s fee or something, but boo to that.

2. Give it the old college try!

Giving something the “old college try” is an expression that I think went out of style sometime in the 50’s, but I still like to say it every now and again. I’m not sure I know exactly what it means; I think maybe something about trying really hard? If that’s really the case, the expression is not only out of style, but now, culturally inaccurate. While some college students try really hard at their work, most only try hard at three things: instant messaging, sleeping in, and drinking. Anyway, my real point is this: most of my college friends are on Facebook, thus Facebook is a more useful network for me to use. Also, I didn’t join Myspace until after I graduated, and I used Facebook for three years of my Denison experience, so Facebook holds some pleasant university nostalgia for me. Many of my groups, and in general the higher organization of the site, are based around univerisities and university activities. Facebook’s intrinsic links to college and the college lifestyle make it cool by association, and thus better than Myspace.

1. So sketchy….

This is really the most important reason that I tend to shy away from Myspace, and thus prefer Facebook. If it weren’t for this reason, all of the other reasons would probably be negated by the anti-reason. But Myspace just really turns me off with its disproportionately high Extreme Sketchiness Factor (ESF). I feel like I’m constantly being solicited for things by less than honest people when I sign on to Myspace. Take, for example, the ten or twenty friend requests that I get at the beginning of each month. The requesting profiles generally feature a photo of an attractive woman, and a cookie-cutter greeting that reads something like this:

“Hey, your profile is pretty cool. I just wanted to say hi, because I’m new to myspace and I don’t have that many friends yet. Anyway, all of my friends have been trying to get me to post nude pictures of myself on the internet, and I’ve finally done it! All you have to do is click on this link: www.pornandviruses.com“

Regardless of your moral stance on porn, unsollicited porn from unknown sources should be enough to make any computer user leery. And it’s not just porn that makes Myspace a shady site. I received one friend request from a user that didn’t have any ramblings about nude pictures in the friend request, but when I clicked on the profile picture to see what this person was all about, Mozilla Firefox popped up a message saying “to view all of the media on this page, you must download additional plugins”. I had gotten this message before on sites like www.comedycentral.com, and so I downloaded and installed the plugins, thinking nothing of it. Then the popups started, and I cursed myself for allowing Myspace to dupe me. Fortunately, after Ad-Aware cleared off the 43 new critical objects found on my computer, things started to run smoothly again. More about Ad-Aware to follow in future posts.

Really, I just get tired of people asking me to support their band, check out their webcam, or look at their potentially virus and adware-ridden porn. Facebook just seems like a much cleaner, more secure site to me. In the words of one of my roommates’ ex-girlfriends who was once asked to climb a tree, “I’ll stay down here on the ground where it’s nice and safe, thank you very much. HA!”

Well, that rounds out today’s top 5. If you think Myspace is better than Facebook, I would be perfectly willing to hear your arguments. For example, if someone created a Myspace profile for Tucker Carlson that expressed the full magnitude of his suckiness, it would certainly earn the site brownie points. I wish you all happy friending; and remember, stay away from www.pornandviruses.com. Tootles.

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Tags: facebook, myspace, photo, porn, profile, viruses