I saw this article and began to think. I don’t really watch TV. My Myspace profile didn’t even list any TV shows until today. I enjoy the Soprano’s and Entourage and Penn and Teller: Bullshit. I find that I don’t watch these on a TV I watch them on my laptop on a ferry ride home. But I never sit down in front of the TV to watch a given show.
I flip through channels and find myself wanting to see a movie instead. I would ditch the cable but I enjoy the broadband so much more. I sometimes watch the History channel and even at the gym the TV was always annoying. My trust iPod and my collection of music and podcasts has always satisfied me.
I have found that being a “gamer” for most of the beginnings of my life found myself being a little to addicted to this box that is currently in front of me. There are aspects of computing that I enjoy but since I interact with one all day I find myself wanting to get out and be with people.
But I have noticed since the internet has been getting more views then TV are we really communicating on any higher level? We connect to sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, PodShow+, etc. We are connecting with “People I haven’t talked to since High School” Well usually there is a reason you stopped talking to begin with. People would rather text message then talk. The valid argument is that it saves minutes. I have found that if someone is not worth the minutes are they really even worth texting? I tend to make points about these sites a great deal. I recieve a great deal of feedback saying “If you dislike these sites so much why do you have them?”
My argument for having these sites is if I ask someone for an e-mail address since it’s a lot easier to whip up gMail since that is what all my e-mail is run on now. Tristan.Pipo@gMail.com and Tristan@TristanPipo.com are both hosted on gMail for your Domain. I can click on the To: field and type a partial name and good to go. MySpace Messages are a good way to communicate and stay somewhat private. But after I have exchanged a few myspace messages I much prefer to save my time and get an e-mail address and handle communication on that level.
I have noticed that people are using the MySpace Blgos function a great deal more. I find it confusing and annoying. I have to login to myspace. View an Ad, Go to my Profile, Click Blog, Then Post Blog and then I have about a billion settings to configre. Like the mood box. Then people say it’s easy to subsribe.
All the blogs I read I keep organized at BlogLines.com I can go to one page and read all the blogs I desire. It doesn’t work with myspace blogs. You have to subsribe internally. So because of all the extra configuration and it doesn’t sync with my mobile phone I find myself not making the extra effort to read a myspace blog that is filled with ads. I am always on the go I need information as fast as possible. Myspace just not deliver it to me. I try to make it as easy as possible for people to get my content but I have the techie-ness to do so. Most people on the other hand do not really care and do what is easy for them. People in the real blogosphere I like the fact that they “get it” where as the myspace culture does not really. I see people with 200+ friends. I can’t fathom that anyone has enough time to spend with all these people.
Though another thought I ponder is customization. I can customize every aspect about how my site is run and I do it in such a fashion to keep the overhead low and the site looking nice. I remove any slowdown there are no ads and I intend to keep it that way. But I know what I am doing (For the Most Part 😉 ) We go look at myspace and find that people can go grab these templates and throw them up when people just regard this CSS file and even though it is fairly complex the average end user has no clue really what they are doing. They do something that looks good while at a loss of functionality so they can “express themselves”. Are you really expressing yourself if your horrible site crashes my browser. I found a work around for disabiling CSS on MySpace in Firefox and it reloads the page so that I can view these myspace pages. But they take a bunch of people that don’t know what they are doing and give them poor tools to make a “custom” page from other people that have no idea what they are doing or just bogging it down to make a few bucks. But anytime I put this down the flames start and I get all kinds of myspace messages or e-mail saying “Death to Tristan” (Well perhaps not that intense just going for some artistic license). It used to be back in the old web days the people had to have ability and skill to create such things but now that it’s all done for you. Your making my online experience crazy and lagged down =p.
I went from giving up TV a MySpace tangent. Crazy. Tale of Drinking Part 2 will be online for The Wonderful Beer Friday. I hope to make you chuckle while you enjoy your morning coffee.