A weekly series of questions unrelated to the usual topics that I’ve been wondering about but haven’t been able to google the answers to.
If you’re on myspace, you’re already used to ignoring all sortsa unknown bands who wanna be your “friend.” You ignore the spammers. You ignore the “girls” with profile pics showcasing fake boobs in tiny bikinis. You ignore slightly creepy people who intermittently send you the same pasted-in message.
But lately I’ve been getting a lot — and I really mean a lot — of friend requests from seemingly green-related orgs and companies. It seems that they’re all discovering myspace now, and they all wanna be my friend.
For a while I was adding a good number of these — out of a sense of solidarity or whatever — but now my friend list’s about to hit 3 digits, and that makes me strangely uncomfortable. I suppose my circle of friends, drawn widely, contains more than 100 peeps, but most of those people aren’t on myspace. They’re old. Or on Friendster (aka old). Or strangely e-shy.
So I’m thinking of deleting everyone who’s not actually a friend — or an individual reader of green LA girl. I mean, who’s Conscious Choice? Or The Environmental Site? Plus, sitting in my “friend requests” queue are SustainLane, Sustainable Harvest, Toxin Free Tomorrow, TurnWalmartGreen, etc.
Yet I’d feel like a meanie rejecting a Toxin Free Tomorrow….
I’m thinking way too hard about this. But I’m sorta curious — How do you deal with myspace requests?
In closing I’d like to say I always love adding readers as friends so this post isn’t about you; it’s about non-individual businesses and orgs.
That’s why facebook.com is awesome. It keeps all the creepies away and you can actually network with people. It also has the added bonus of no nasty advertising…actually there is very little advertising.
With all that said. I still have a stupid myspace page. Everybody else is doing it…
Comment by Blake — May 22, 2007 @ 11:16 pm
I just turn ‘em all down. Other than one band, everyone in my friend list (including all the other bands) is someone that I know personally from face to face encounters.
Comment by don hosek — May 23, 2007 @ 7:08 am
not sure if you tweaked all the options within the myspace setup.. you can get alot of those bands to be permanently ignored/blocked. You should definitely delete people who are in no way a friend… and just ignore the pointless friend requests… MY default reaction to all adds is reject.. and Ive been using myspace since 2004.. I can still look through my 200 or so friends and I know 95% of them in some legit way.
Comment by bicyclemark — May 23, 2007 @ 4:47 pm
Myspace can be great for outside-your-immediate-circle networking. Also good as a social calendar for all the bands/clubs/parties you dig. And don’t forget the Myspace Impact Awards. I’ve just accepted the fact that I’ll get spam on myspace and it’ll take a couple of minutes a day to clean. I haven’t turned off bands because I’ve found a couple of real winners because we had a few other bands in common.
But a good number of people are flocking to the cleanliness of virb.com Much better for your inner circle and so far devoid of ads & creeps. I’ve finally decided to move over there.
Comment by Demian — May 23, 2007 @ 6:30 pm
Okay — I’ve deleted a number of people and ignored a bunch in the queue — bringing my “friends” list into the 80-something range.
Facebook’s for people in school though, no? I don’t identify that strongly as a USC person, so I don’t have a facebook account….
I do like to add some bands, but usually it’s because I like their music and then looked for them on myspace, not the other way around –
Demian — Lemme know how virb goes –
Comment by Siel — May 27, 2007 @ 11:23 pm