MYSPACE. An important online community portal, in which you can join, (free of charge), build an instant website,
personal profile page, a blog page, and through which you can establish a vast community of friends with similar interests to your own virtually overnight.
Myspace first of all lets you set up a basic page, similar to my own here at http://www.myspace.com/56954240 You create a basic profile following standard easy instructions, giving your name (or a pretend name if you prefer), a photo, (not necessarily of yourself, and you can leave the function blank if you prefer). You can then add information such as your age, approximate location, Manchester, England in my case, your age, whether you smoke or not, and whether you are single or married. Now you make a brief statement about whom you are and what you do, your hobbies, and the kind of people you think will most appreciate your Myspace page? Next, you can make lists of your interests in categories, i.e.; music, film, Television, etc. You can download a theme song for your page, though I prefer not to as if you visit a page for a while, the same song repeating itself can get irritating unless you mute the sound. You can add photos, quizzes, and surveys (there are several templated ones ready to download on Myspace). The Blog pages enable you to add daily
messages and essays, which can be read by anyone visiting your Myspace page. Now you want to do what Myspace is best at – establishing friends. You will see that you automatically have a friend, called Tom. He is the chap who owns and runs Myspace. There are two ways to find and establish more friends. 1/. Invite the people you have e-mails for to come and join you by setting up their own Myspace pages. Some may have one already. 2/. Visit the established Myspace users. If you like their profile page, and what they are about, invite them to join your community of friends. They will accept, ignore or block your request as they wish. At the top of the Myspace page, there is a search engine, so you can look for people and subjects of interest throughout Myspace. So, if you lay The White Stripes, (the rock band), key their name in, and you will find several fan sites relating to them. In the case of some famous people, the real person him or her self will have a Myspace page. Be aware though, that imitators run some such sites. Some celebrities find a dozen pages run by people speaking as them in the first person. It’s a practice that should be frowned upon. The real joy is that once you find a page you like and visit it, (even without joining), you can click your way through the friends already acquired by that person, and therefore have direct friend-invite potential to thousands of other fans of The White Stripes, or whoever and whatever floats your boat. You will find also that once you have been on Myspace for even a few days, people will send you invite to join them. As you accept someone as your friend, you are automatically added to his or her friend’s list which immediately tells his or her friends about you too, and so the network expands. There are some users who just invite everyone in sight, running friends lists into the thousands without a care for any of him or her. They just want to have more than anyone else. Generally it is best to keep your friends list to just those people you genuinely share an interest with. I generally block such users. You may sometimes find a friend you picked up isn’t to your liking at all in which case just deleting and blocking them. I’m glad to say I rarely do that. Myspace, often never to be seen again, generally quickly bans those few idiots using Myspace to send out spam or abuse. It’s very well policed in that respect. As your friends network grows, your range of options expands dramatically. You can send out ‘Bulletins’, which are messages for each and every friend on your list though this should be used for more than just telling people you went to the pub last night, or the cat has just had kittens. You can also send messages to a publicly readable list on a Friends myspace page, and read them on yours. You have options to delete unwanted messages. The flexibility of Myspace is tremendous. It serves well for anyone unable to create a personal website on their own servers, and serves as a great complimentary page to existing websites like mown here, which you are reading now. In fact my Myspace page is in strict competition with the main website here on most search engines. As well as seeing individual friends, you can see thousands of Myspace group communities covering every subject under the Sun, and interact with other people’s blogs. Writers will find publishers here, and many bands find venues for gigs. Some people just run a basic blog and say hi to a few chums, which is great. Others use Myspace more imaginatively, as with the Historic Friends, enabling me to add Leonardo Da Vinci, Oliver Cromwell and Machiavelli to my list among many others. The possibilities are endless.