MySpace, we need to talk.
I think it's time we started seeing other people.
So, I've been using MySpace's built-in blogging option for a few years now. And it's OK. But that's all. Just OK. I feel like I don't really have "ownership" of the MySpace blog in quite the same way as I do over here. Plus this one has more versatility and I don't get strung up with quite so much format/code wanking when want to do something terrible like post a YouTube vid. The inertia I feel every time I want to post to MySpace is partly down to it being more complicated. Tumblr is easier. Plus I can integrate the Tumblr blog into my website more easily, rather than having to link to an external page. Oh, and if I link off to another site you don't hit the speedbump of "YOU ARE LEAVING MYSPACE! ABANDON ALL HOPE" (or whatever that stupid warning actually says). so, Tumblr; good solution.
Except I'd also feel a little like I was betraying MySpace.
That sounds dumb, I know, but bear with me here. MySpace was my first social networking site. Back before my friends discovered Facebook (which I'd actually looked at long before them and written off as being too closed, insular and controlling - which I still believe by the way), I was all over MySpace like a rash. Sending friend requests to all sorts of people. It was fun. I started a blog back in 2000 on an old website (I called it a diary, since the word "blog" hadn't really caught on back then).
I used to do it entirely in raw HTML. What a ball-ache. That site faded out after a couple of years and I started a fresh site that was mainly blog and nothing else. All in the raw HTML again.
Then I picked up MySpace. The original MySpace I had is still up here (though if you're not a friend then you don't get to look). Signed up in February 2006 and started blogging more or less immediately. Unfortunately, MySpace stopped allowing people to convert their profiles to musician profiles, so I had to set up a fresh one; the current one. Shifted blogging to the new option around 18 months ago and privated the old one, but it's still not quite what I want.
And then there's the other problem with MySpace. Specifically, that it sort of feels like the only people actually on there these days are musicians and other self-promoters. Feels like everyone has a MySpace just because everyone has a MySpace.
I don't want to be a rat deserting a sinking ship (and, actually, I think that with a little careful and obvious repositioning MySpace could become a destination again), but I'm toying with the idea of pulling my blogging closer to my own site, slotting the page from Tumblr in there and welding the edges together so it all looks seamless even though you'd be off-site. It'd actually probably be fairly easy to do this.
But I'd shed a tear for MySpace. I don't want it to die. Ideally, I'd like to slot the Tumblr blog into the MySpace page just like I'm putting it on my own site. But how?
All this internal debate means, of course, that if I'm honest with myself then I've already made the decision to do this.
*sigh*
It's been fun MySpace. I'll still call in regularly. But it's just not the same any more, is it?
I think it's time we started seeing other people.
Seej 500
3/10/2009, Yorkshire, UK