myspace came up in conversation last night, which was funny because i’d been meaning to blog about it after my weekend love affair with it. it’s fascinating how 1990s a lot of the profiles are — giant images, gaudy backgrounds, blinking multi-colored text, music playing in the background, text you can’t read over the loud background images/colors, and endless profiles that match this description. i thought we’d left the 90s. i thought that web sites had grown up and matured. but i’m thinking now that this is most peoples’ sense of aesthetics. they think this looks good. or they’re so excited about what they can do, that they don’t care it doesn’t look good — it flashes and is colorful and pretty cause i made it, yay!

it’s really cute.

so i was trying to explain how i was forced into a myspace account. i’ve got a friendster account, an orkut account, i think even a tribe account. i’m linkedin, on classmates.com, and i yelp and i barf — not to mention i’m on match.com and personals.yahoo.com (both with hidden profiles because i keep telling myself i’m not quite ready to date yet :) how many profiles can one person maintain?

so someone signed up with my email address, i started getting her myspace emails, got tired of it, deleted her account. she or someone else signed up immediately with my email address again, and this time i just updated the password and took over the account. filled out a minimal profile, no pic. then added a lame pic, then recently some decent pics, and voila! i have a myspace account! and last weekend i started really poking around on the site — looking at profiles, reading all my old email and responding to people, researching groups, etc. for a second i thought to myself, josh has a myspace account, am i supposed to ask him to be my friend?, then immediately wiped that thought from my mind — what 13, soon to be 14 year old boy would want to have his mom listed as a friend?! that is so gross.

so anyway — i got a nice date out of it and met some interesting people. you can’t fight the tide of popularity. but fuck, you can laugh at what it brings.

I noticed last night that orkut now lists the exact number of smileys, ice cubes, and hearts that you have. Which is interesting because now you can see the ratios of your ratings (it can’t be an absolute value because I have more ice cubes than I have actual friends). So I’m roughly equal in smileys and hearts, but have a spike in cubes. It would be more interesting if they showed the exact number of votes you had – that way, you’d know exactly how many of the people on your friends list thought a, b, or c of you. And if you’re really anal you could watch to see which votes increased when you added new friends.

There’s something perversely intimate about orkut. Yet I do not withhold information from it, nor do I stop using it. In fact, sometimes I go and add information to it. These networking sites are strangely not unlike high school. How many friends do you have and just how popular are you? I never had many of the former, and was definitely not the latter. Doing better on orkut than I did as a teenager – and perhaps that’s the whole point.