IT Trends :: Thursday, April 13, 2006
Opinion
MySpace Is, In Fact, Addictive
By Terry Calhoun
Beware. What little free time you might have could easily get sucked up inside of MySpace. What else is new? Well, this is a first-hand report.
On February 14, 2006, I bit the bullet and subscribed to MySpace. I now have eleven friends! No, make that twelve. Even cooler, one of them has been dead since 2002. Really, I spoke with him in a hotel restaurant the night before he had his fatal stroke, yet he lives on in MySpace.
MySpace needs to grow up a little in order to be user friendly for Boomers. It’s understandable that much of its content and structure is aimed at younger people, but there is potential there for all ages. It needs, for example, to permit me to not display my Zodiac sign – it d'es this automatically when I give it my birth date, which is required. I sure wish I could toggle that nonsense off.
My dead MySpace friend is “Steady” Ed Headrick, the inventor of the modern Frisbee™ and the grandfather of the most popular little-known sport, disc golf. You might have seen the episode of Believe It Or Not where Ed’s widow poured his ashes into molten plastic so that they could be molded into a series of expensive flying discs. I own two. One is a putter with which I made 500 putts with no misses and then retired. The other is a driver, which has been on the wall in my office since I got it. “Steady” Ed has 467 MySpace friends...
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