The Worst of MySpace*

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Not only does the layout for Cocaine Energy Drink’s profile suck, the concept is completely ghey as well. I don’t advocate the use of drugs. In fact, stoner-dudes older than 14 make me want to go on a WWE-style bong-smashing rampage: I can’t stand retards who flaunt their lame drug habit.

Then again, I don’t necessarily advocate abstinence. Maybe the self-styled drug guinea pig, Terence McKenna, was on to something when he said every man could be a Magellan in his own mind if he chowed a bag of mushrooms and laid down in a dark room for couple of hours.

Of course, McKenna died from a nasty case of brain cancer at age 53. These things happen.

Hoo-ahh!

Anyway, cool things are not mainstream. Most drugs are cool because they’re *not* mainstream. Pot is uncool because it has been almost completely mainstreamed — your grandma smokes pot. Porn is rapidly becoming mainstreamed and because I subscribe so avidly only to cool things, pretty soon I won’t be watching it anymore (and what to do with all the new-found spare time?)

Cocaine, however, should never, ever be mainstreamed. Not only is crack wack, but cocaine is practically the mortar that binds the foundation of our cultural elite and their concept of self-cool, from club rats to supermodels to Al Pacino in Scarface.

To mainstream cocaine is to attack the very fabric of our culture of vapidity and idolatry. As a society, it’s self-destructive and frankly I don’t like it!

Save America and Al Pacino by keeping drugs cool: Boycott lame soft drinks!

So I set up a profile on Facebook the other day. My old ass missed the Facebook phenomenon by a couple of years, but now that they’ve opened it up to any schmo off the street, I can finally get on there and start stalking college hotties like the brothers over at the GHB house.

Smart Cousin, Stupid Cousin

Facebook is like the quiet, well-dressed, overachieving cousin that spent more time studying than partying in college, but that everyone knows is going to be heading a Fortune 500 company by the time he’s 30.

MySpace is the drunkenly boisterous, sloven, borderline-retarded cousin that everyone likes — because he’s just so fun and goofy! — but quickly grow sick of when he starts farting on people and talking about tea-bagging episodes with his football buddies at community college.

I still don’t get the whole point of social networking for social networking’s sake, but Facebook is slightly less pointless than MySpace, easy to use, fast, looks good (because people can’t edit the design), groups people into logical networks, and has cool Web 2.0 features. There are also much better privacy controls.

Best of all? NO STUPID ERROR MESSAGES!

The long run

From a business standpoint, probably the most important thing to note is that Facebook has staying power: its life cycle as a product extends past the 14-22 demographic to which MySpace seems to cater almost exclusively. The user experience is stable; it’s tasteful and you know what to expect.

Adults (no, college kids aren’t adults) aren’t going to be scared to use Facebook. You’re not going to be embarrassed to be caught looking at a Facebook profile while at work at your law office in five or 10 years, as opposed to pulling up that MySpace profile of some idiot friend of yours who insists on having flashing bling gifs and “Happy Hump Day!” porn plastered everywhere.

Le Mort d’MySpace

Facebook is going to kill MySpace. You heard it here first. Unless MySpace gets a complete user experience overhaul, they’re Friendster 2.0.

Shut up. I don’t care about 90 million users blah blah blah. I’ve been saying this for years (to deaf ears): It’s all about the user experience, and given a choice, people will ultimately take the path of least resistance. And when MySpace is the path hastily carved by a wheelchair-bound monkey on acid, paved with broken glass shards, dead babies and fart smell, the choice is not hard to make.

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NASCAR scares me. It’s a bunch of redneck types drinking lots of pissy beer, sitting in a big circle watching cars explode and spray flaming debris all over their fellow bystanders.

They worship Dale Earnhardt like he’s f*cking Elvis and make really bad ESPN movies about him (anyone see “3″?).

Even worse, they worship his kid as if he was Senior reincarnate. Picture Junior quivering and his eyes glowing green as his dad’s wispy translucent soul flies around the track a bit and then enters his son’s body through the mouth with the screech of a banshee.

Reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

And now women are getting into NASCAR. That’s even scarier.

See, men get all crazy with sports and competitive things; women hate that sh*t. But that’s a good thing because it helps keep men grounded. When men are screaming at the TV and acting like they’re getting a red hot poker shoved up their ass, women come along and say, “Knock that sh*t off, you f*ckin’ ape. Get off the sofa.”

But now women are getting into NASCAR. Have a look at today’s Worst, Crystal. She and her family seem like nice common Southern folk, but her page betrays her obsession. That stupid flashing page bling combined with low-grade animated pictures of Dale, Jr. is enough to make me want to drink gasoline and do like the little Calvin pictures and pee on the NASCAR logo in front of thousands of bleating, sunburned rednecks.

Just to start some fights, you know?

This crazy biznatch scares me even more I think (Curses! She went Private!).

Anyway, I suppose that the Nascar chick phenomenon is yet another indicator of the decline of Western civilization as we know it. Allahu akbar!

A bunch of you today are reporting that MySpace is telling you that your account was “deleted.” I’m having problems logging into my account too, though I’m only getting the idiotic “Sorry! An unexpected error has occurred” message.

I’m guessing the database (Excel spreadsheet) is all messed up after Tom’s weekend folly, which probably involved a lot of mojito-drinking, swimming in a big pool of gold coins, kicking strippers out of his house and tripping over power cables.

I’m 100% sure the only reason Tom made out like such a bandit in the News Corp. purchase is that he is probably the only one who knows the mind-numbing nuances of running the big blue Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. They need him around in case a mouse farts and the system breaks.

Otherwise, he’d be out on a yacht making a beeline for the Seychelles right now. Picture the day when we never have to read another “Hey folks …” message again.

And remember, Worst may vanish inexplicably for weeks at a time, but I’ll never leave you.

Man, look at this BS. I go away for a little bit and when I come back, MySpace has taken a huge dump. So their “datacenter” (aka Tom’s closet) lost power and the “backup generator” (hamster wheel) failed. Sounds like a quality operation to me! Who is running your datacenter? Enrique’s House O’ Quality Servers N’ Stuff?

“Wanna place a bet?”, Tom asks. You know what, Tom. I did place a bet. And I won, bitch.

Based on the comments on my Gallery of MySpace Errors, it looks like people are still having lots of problems. In fact, about every three clicks, I get a “Connection reset” error or some such. A couple other people reported comments not working and other weirdness.

If MySpace hopes to compete, they should rewrite their whole cobbled POS using programmers that know what they’re doing, not trained monkeys. People are getting fed up with this crap, and considering the minuscule attention span of the MTV Generation that makes up the majority of their users, MySpace should be very worried about losing people to rivals that have built something that, oh, actually works.

Like a dam-burst, it starts as a trickle …