Seriously, guys. I miss pimping my profile. I miss the hours spent on layouts, wallpaper, font, scrollbars…. and let me tell you, I was a kick-ass profile-pimper. I didn’t use any of those prefab layouts, thank-you-very-much. I had elaborate color schemes and contact boxes and a personalized header featuring my cat. (And as a result of my profile-pimping prowess, I actually taught myself a fair amount of html, which later came in handy while putting together other websites. Because once again: I can’t just use the prefab template without tweaking it…. oh nooooooooo.)
I miss having a profile song. Dear lord, I HAD to have a profile song to match my every mood… the perfect profile song that would subliminally communicate my deep, angsty, yearning, unabashed, ridiculous love for (insert name here).
Your page was YOUR space, you know?
Like your little room with your posters and your records and your bedspread.
Then my friend Maureen and I discovered Project Playlist. Don’t even get me started on Project Playlist. Hours and hours spent searching for songs to represent our personalities and moods… also with a color scheme…. also to communicate hidden messages…. or not. Sometimes we just put it on shuffle. Sometimes the music was an homage to a time, a place, a moment…
(I’d like to point out that I wasn’t on myspace as a teenager. I was like, um…. 33.)
I miss blogging on myspace. Something about it was… easier there. People would subscribe to your blog, and leave dozens of comments… I had a strange cult-like following on myspace. Crazy, but true. My comment-section was glorious; people met on there. There were discussions. Plus you could post what you were reading/watching/listening to at the bottom. (“Reading: The Road. Listening: The Avett Brothers. Watching: I Heart Huckabees.” Or whatever.) Which was awesome at the time, because what better way to signify your coolness?
I miss the Top 8. I miss the way the comments were lined up on the page. Bulletins…. wow, remember how pissed off everyone was about the survey-bulletins? Those bulletins were for important information, damn it. Sigh.
The one thing I liked about Facebook when I made the switch was the tagging of the photos… besides that, I switched because, well… that’s where everyone else went. And there’s no point in lame-o social networking if you’re doing it alone. Social networking alone = even more lame-o.
(Also Facebook has the main feed – where you can kinda keep an eye on everyone at once. Myspace required that you check on individual profiles one at a time, like you’re visiting people in their little rooms… Which frankly was a little more like stalking. But as I said from the beginning of this social media thing: back in the day if you liked someone, you’d pile in the car with your friends and do a drive-by on your crush’s house. Were the lights on? Was the car in the driveway? Was someone else’s car in the driveway? Scream, giggle, circle the block, repeat… Dude, were we all stalkers in the 90s? Anyway, myspace put an end to the innocent drive-by. You could obsessively refresh a person’s profile page instead.)
Full Disclosure: I might have a soft spot for myspace (the golden age of myspace, not what it became… not what it is now, which is buggy and ad-laden and way too overeager to please everyone…. I’m talking pre-2007ish myspace) because we wrote a whole show about it… lived it, embodied it, ate/slept/drank it…
But I think it’s more likely that I miss myspace because it ultimately gave users a venue to express themselves… Your page was YOUR space, you know? Like your little room with your posters and your records and your bedspread. It was meant to represent you. That’s what made it different from Friendster, and Facebook, and whatever else.
(I never got into Friendster… in retrospect I have no idea why not, because seeing how people connect to each other and figuring out degrees of separation is my jam.)
Ugh, Facebook is still so bland. So blue and white. You “like,” you tag old embarrassing photos, you check in via Foursquare, you let people know what you’re doing… you communicate via Facebook. Myspace (again: old-school myspace… the “old-school” of like 4 years ago… sheesh) allowed you to encapsulate yourself with graphics and images and music and words. It was about communication, yes, but more about identity.
At the end of the day, you could say, “Well Kim, aren’t you glad those days are over? Look at the countless hours you wasted while creating an elaborate profile-background featuring a collage of thumbnails of every album you ever owned…. But now everything’s different…. now you have a life.”
Sure. Um. Yeah.