Onto the wagon

The Myspace wagon, that is. I guess that's what everyone's doing nowadays, right? In the past few weeks, I've been urged by no fewer than three people to join. I was bored last night and figured, what the heck.

This thing is actually pretty cool. I can see why people like it better than Friendster. Although, Friendster does have this on them: it's way more fun to friendster someone than to myspace them. Or myspace-buddy them? I dunno... what's the myspace verb?

One thing that's both cooler and more dangerous about myspace is that, once you have more than eight friends, you can choose who are the first few people to pop up on your profile page as friends. Friendster does this randomly -- I think by date of most recently joined -- and you can't alter it. This is cool because you can make yourself look like you have a bunch of hot friends, or multi-ethnic friends, or athletic friends, or friends who don't like their pictures taken, etc. But it's scary because you could also use it to just pick your favorite friends.

Now, in my opinion, people who do this are just plain silly. Picking your favorites is so easy, and it leaves open the possibility of lost friends if they can't deal with the fact that your boyfriend and your sister and your dog come first. Oh my god, I totally need to make my dog a Myspace profile.

But there are some people who will go this pedestrian route and they'll end up with angry friends, or fewer friends, or something. This is because they fundamentally misunderstand the fact that you can and should use this function strategically. Just like your display photo affects how people see you, your first eight friends affect how people see you.

You may love Bertha dearly, but the fact that she's picking her nose in her display photo is not going to make Johnny Depp think "I must become myspace friends with this girl [note the inferior verbage], after which we will fall in love and I will leave Vanessa Paradis for her in a heartbeat, because I know I've been lying to myself and I am not really French but I am truly an Angelino."

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Ahem.

Anyway, the types of friends you choose to put up front and center affects how people see you. Let's face it, folks, we live in an image-conscious society. Who you put forward as your friends makes a difference. If you're on Myspace for "networking," you should find yourself a handful of clean-cut, respectable-looking friends, preferably with face-on photos, conservative backgrounds and suits. If you're on for "dating," make sure there's a healthy balance of fun-but-non-threatening-looking male and female friends -- you don't want to look like a slut but you also don't want to look like one of those people who can't maintain opposite-sex relationships.

You get the idea. Hurt feelings? Psh. You have more important things to worry about.

Now, what about the person who is on for both "networking" and "dating," or other things?

Right now there isn't a solution to that. You have to pick what's more important to you. This is retarded, in my opinion. Cell phones have varying ringtones and callback tones depending on the number they come from -- why not introduce a function into Myspace that shows different profiles depending on what IP address your profile is accessed from? You know it's totally doable.

Listen up, Tom. If you take care of this I might even put you in my top eight.