Rants
Myspace PDF Print E-mail
Written by David   
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 11:07

!@#$ing Myspace.

As of September 7, 2 007, there are over 200 million accounts. 1

This number ASTOUNDS me. That means nearly 200 million people are making money for the Myspace company.

Don't know what I mean? Well there are companies like Google who have a marketing system where users who put Google ads get paid when certain ads show up on the user's site. The revenue made on those ads being shown isn't much... Maybe a couple of cents per show, but multiply that by the number of users who go to Myspace on a regular basis.

There are other systems called pay-per-click (ppc) where the user who advertises gets paid even more. It might only be twenty five cents but, again, multiply that by the number of users who visit each day.

Another popular service marketers will use is a higher paying system, but only because it is harder to get a "sale" on it. If an end user is on a site and clicks a link on site "A" to another site and signs up for a service or purchases something from site "B", site "A" makes a commission that could be a number of dollars. Now multiply that by the number of users.

"MySpace is now generating in excess of $30 million a month in revenue, with about $24 million in domestic revenue and $6 million internationally. He adds that monthly revenues should more than double over the next 12 months, and “at very high incremental revenue margins.” So in 12 months, he’s saying, MySpace should be doing more than $60 million a month in revenue, for an annual run rate in the neighborhood of $750 million a year."

So my congratulations goes to Tom and the rest of the Myspace team for inadvertantly making a multi-million dollar website.

Here is my other peeve of Myspace. It has become a popularity contest.

"Nearly 80 percent of our members are 18 years or older, ..." 2

This means that people who are OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL are still looking to see how many "friends" they can have. People will add and accept "friends" that they will never meet, never message, and have no interest in other than they are another means by which to increase their "Your Network" number.

I will admit that I have a Myspace account, but only because I am always getting people sending me messages saying something to the effect of, "look at what I did to my Myspace page." Honestly I don't give a damn what anyone has done to their Myspace page.

I am disappointed that, with the ease of making a personal website, that people still resort to using a place like Myspace as a way to "express" themselves with their blogs and their music lists.

And those people who put mp3s and music videos on their pages that both start playing at the same time. WTF are they thinking? Have they no common sense? How the hell do they think that their "friends" can listen to one and watch AND listen to the other? I have never come to a page where putting both of those on one page actually works. ALL those people need to be slapped. USE YOUR EFFING BRAIN!!!

In case anyone who might read this wants to see what I think about Myspace on my Myspace page, here is the link.

Click Here for My Myspace
Click the Image for My Myspace


Now, if you have gone there and have a question about what the hell all that text says, by all means, click here. For those of you who don't want to click another link, here is a bit quoted from the site:

"Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum."

I think "dummy text of the printing and typsetting industry" fits the entire context of Myspace.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace

2 www.news.com/MySpace-growth-continues-amid-criticism/2100-102

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Happiness PDF Print E-mail
Written by David   
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 11:04

I spent my childhood as part of a poor family. We spent a lot of time moving from place to place so my dad could run away from whatever he was running from. I have never been what a person might call “stable”. I’ve never been stable emotionally, socially or financially. I’ve grown used to the idea that there are certain things in life that might not change. And some things may only change a little. And I’m thankful for those things that do change for the better.

There will always be trials in life and there will always be things to deal with. No matter whom you are or where you live there are issues to deal with. It’s all based on perspective. As a child, our biggest issue was where we left our lost toy. As we get older, we have to worry about social acceptance by having the newest car or the most up-to-date music or sunglasses or wardrobe. As adults we have to have money and a job and be able to fake self confidence well enough that the rest of the world thinks we’re “normal”. But really how much different are things now than they were before? The toys are made by Mercedes and BMW now. The wardrobe changed from Billabong to Armani.

We’ve become so absorbed in the ideas that without the newest and the best and whatever the “social norm” happens to be at that time in life, that we can’t be happy. It used to be that people could be happy with a minimalistic life. Now there are bumper stickers that state social mentality pretty straightforwardly: “He who dies with the most toys, wins.”

Have we really come to a point in life that we can’t be happy with people anymore? We have to have things to compensate for our lack of compassion and understanding. We’re willing to almost sell our souls to get the things to fit in. We get credit cards and spend money that isn’t ours. We lease cars now because in three years it won’t be the newest and best thing and we can just go trade it in. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on places to live that we call home.

What is home? I mean really, what is home? It’s that place where we feel safe. Do we need to spend the next thirty years of our lives paying for a place that will most likely not be worth the cost? Andrew Largeman said it best in Garden State: ”You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone.

"You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

What happened to just being happy? What happened to finding something in life and clinging to it because it made you happy and for no other reason than that?

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