WhoseSpace?

I wasn’t looking for another reason to hate MySpace, I really wasn’t.

In fact, I had rather hoped to avoid all contact with the wretched thing.

For those of you (mom) who don’t know, MySpace is a “social networking” website that people use to blog, as well as to cultivate friends/contacts/etc. for chatting, sharing music, etc. With over 100 million accounts, MySpace just overtook Yahoo for U.S. web traffic. It’s the sixth-largest website in the world.

It’s also the first-largest collection of gomers in the world. Although the site is a wonderful tool for artists and musicians who want to network, it’s also the network of choice for pubescent ramblings and sleaze.

Kids as young as 14 can sign up, and that usually sets the tone. The default blog design is hideous and choked with ads that you cannot remove. It rates poorly for accessibility, and user-customized design frequently can be described as “a teenager’s bedroom after a tornado” or worse, “design that can make elves go blind.” And I’ve never seen more horizontal scrolling in my life.
Oh, and it’s owned by News Corp, so all those irritating ads line the pockets of Rupert Murdoch.

There are plenty of people I like and respect with MySpace accounts. Fellow CBC blogger Laurence Stevenson has one; so do George Stroumboulopoulos and Gillian Deacon. And all the cool bands are on MySpace. And there’s Justin Beach’s CBClove, a nice tool for newtorking the corp’s supporters.
But that still leaves about 99 million accounts for teenagers to act like preteenagers, wankstas to talk like gangstas, and predators and spammers and gossipers and identity thieves to do their thing.

All told, plenty of reasons to steer clear. But the more people start using MySpace, the harder it is to avoid. You can’t communicate with a MySpace blogger, or even leave a comment, without having an account. For months I decided Laurence, Gill and Strombo could do without my witticisms. But then a well-meaning and intelligent MySpace user posted a CBC question on my blog, and asked me to respond on hers.

So I decided to finally bite the bullet, and sign up for a MySpace account. And that’s where this adventure begins.

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Creating an account should be painless enough, I told myself, figuring that I was probably at least as smart as 100 million teenagers.

I should have known right away that this was not, in fact, the case, right after I typed in http://www.myspace.ca/- which turns out to be some guy’s blog, and a WordPress one at that. MySpace may be a worldwide phenomenon, but not enough to make it worth registering or buying out a Canadian domain name. Heck, that could cost tens of dollars, and it’s not like Mr. Murdoch is made of money.

As it turns out, the whole “Canadian” thing is a bit beyond the great minds at MySpace.

To get an account, you must first tell Rupert where you live. This is common enough on sites where registration is required (though not, I should point out, when you sign up for superior blogging sites like Blogger and Wordpress).

So, you head to the drop-down menu to select your country. You’ll notice right away that the list is ridiculously long. In fact, there are more options (228) than actual countries in the world (192).

United States comes up by default and in the middle of the list, so you’ll have to go hunting for Canada. Don’t worry, it’s right there between all those bloggers from Cameroon and Cape Verde.

Once you select Canada, a brand new question pops up:

State/Province: -Please select a Prefecture-

Prefecture? Really? Has nobody at MySpace even traveled to Canada?

Now, if you are from almighty America, you don’t have to pick your state. In fact, almost none of the 200+ options require this level of specificity, and those that do seem completely random. The United Kingdom doesn’t ask for your county, but Ireland does. You’ll also need a Prefecture if you are from Japan… or Australia. Or Denmark (where the only Prefecture to select from is “All”.)

OK, so we select Canada, then the Prefecture of Ontario.

Next box is Postal Code. By this point I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that my postal code didn’t work here, with or without capitals, with or without a space in between. So I reverted to my old standby, “90210″. Worked.

Sort of. At that point it added this new line:

Please enter a valid Postal Code for Canada

Which was nice, in that it acknowledged that they had at least heard of Canada. And once again, no post code variant would work. So, as I often do, I simply picked a different country.

I was torn between Antarctica (penguins!), Vanuatu (looked nice on Survivor) and Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (sounds dangerous) but eventually went for Bouvet Island, one of the dozens of island options that I’d never heard of.

Yesterday I got around to looking it up:

Bouvet Island: This uninhabited volcanic island is almost entirely covered by glaciers and is difficult to approach.

Cooool! Sounds like Skull Island from King Kong, or maybe the place where Happy Feet comes from.

Apparently the place is now a nature preserve run by Norway; its sole feature is an automated weather station. Which, perhaps, has a computer on the internet, so in theory I could blog from there. Except that it’s inaccessible.

So, to recap: while it’s nearly impossible to register on MySpace as a resident of Canada, it’s a breeze to register as someone from a completely uninhabited, glacier-covered, inaccessible volcanic island.

A MySpace search for “bouvet island” reveals 1,050 fellow liars. From perusing their falsehood-ridden profiles, I’ve learned that Bouvet Island was Picard’s intended destination for Starship Enterprise evacuees in First Contact (so they wouldn’t muck up Earth’s history). It may also be “just a piece of shit landfill right off the Jersey Shore.”

There are a few other skill-testing questions, and one of those colourful “verification key” images of psychadelic Scooby Doo letters that you have to type in to prove you aren’t stoned. Then you get to the “profile stuff”.

There’s an opportunity to post a picture of yourself or someone who is better-looking, and to lie about your other physical and mental traits. The defaults are a little odd, even offensive to a father of two like me:

Paul’s Details:
Children: I don’t want kids
You have 1 friends

That one friend is the omnipresent and irritating Tom, who I guess founded MySpace and no doubt got filthy rich, as evidenced by his shiteating grin leering at me under “Paul’s Friend Space”.

That’s about all that you can find on Paul’s MySpace now, apart from ads for the University of Phoenix, Capital One and free horoscopes. Using the default layout, they take up a whopping 75 per cent of the above-the-fold screen real estate. Man, I’m gonna get rich from those, no?

Now that my account has been created, I can go back and enter a few other spurious details about me. For example, I used the dropdown to set my height to the default, which is 1 cm tall.

Though MySpace members have to be at least 14, that’s actually the size of a six-week-old fetus.

However, it does go all the way up to 230 cm, which is 7.5 feet tall. Does Yao Ming have MySpace?

Well, there is in fact one guy who claims to be Yao, but I’m slightly skeptical of his profile comment, “I don’t have to suck Larry Bird’s dick for a spit up chocolate covered gummi bear and a pile of lost tube socks.” Wouldn’t pass the Chinese censors, or Reebok’s.

That said, the real Yao isn’t much of a blogger either - his last official blog entry was March 28th, 2005.

(Oh, and 7′6″ doesn’t actually cover everyone on earth - the tallest man ever was 8′11″. UPDATE: Tallest living man is 7′9″, and just saved two dolphins!)

So, now that the physical business is out of the way (I’ll be damned if I’ll put in my ethnicity or other unecessary tidbits) you can put in stuff to make people think you are interesting: people you’d like to meet, books you claim to have read, your heroes, etc.

But really, I’m exhausted and just can’t be bothered. If you want, you can send me your suggestions and I’ll put them in my profile. They’d be just as accurate as the rest of MySpace.

GASP!

It just occurred to me… I hope MyCBC isn’t going to be like MySpace! The similar nomenclature can’t be a coincidence…

(click to enlarge)

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 12-14-2006 | 04:12 AM
Posted in: Teh Internets | Rants