Out With The New

So, long story short: I got fed up with MySpam and bored with FarceBook, and now it's goodnight, farewell, auf weidersein, adieu to both of them.

Short story long: thing is, I was always kinda dubious. In both cases I started up accounts after friends told me how they were, like, totally the place to be online, and I thought, OK, well, let's give it a try. So first I set up the MySpace account and it's all pretty meh. A personal profile like an internet dating site (Hi, I'm a 36 year old gay male from Glasgow, blah blah blah), with all the lists of favourite books, favourite movies, favourite bands, favourite cakes, favourite items of furniture and suchlike. Yeah, whatever.

But, hey, you can also collect friends, like -- I dunno -- stamps or rocks or something. Of course, you have to deal with SINDY and MINDY and CANDY and SANDY and RANDY and SHANDY who, like, met you at a party and thought you were really hot and want you to know that there's hot pics on their new XXX webcam site. And you also have to decide whether you're actually even remotely interested in Manger of Dirt and Cot of Muck and Perambulator of Mud and every dodgy industrial/alt/thrash/metal/skiffle band from Iowa who wants you to know that they're releasing their first EP at a gig in Buck's Roadhouse just off the I70 between Marion and Asheville, North Carolina.

I mean, OK, there are the con-buddies, and the kindred spirits, and the folks who've read your books and are just really sweet in hunting you down to send a Friend Request and a nice message. Who doesn't like that sorta cool shit? Problem is those messages are all but buried in spam and there's no filters on the site to whittle away the crap. And, of course, you can't actually download it to yer email client and put it in the nice folder for chat that you want to respond to when you've got the time, so you have to deal with it then and there or run the risk of forgetting about it, which is just Bad Form. You can try putting a proper email address in yer profile and a note saying, hey, if ye wanna drop me a line, send it to hal_AT_halduncan_DOT_com, but you can guarantee that somebody will miss that and just message you through the site, so you still basically have one extra online email account that you have to check every so often.

Moving from dial-up to broadband does make MySpace a little less tedious in so far as you don't have to wait ten minutes for [Insert Female Name Here]'s incredibly intricately personalised page to load (while the m -- usic -- they h -- ave -- on i -- t ann-- oyingl --y also -- plays -- whi -- le loading) just so you can find out if that Friend Request is actually from a real person. But you still end up at the end of the day logging on and dealing with this cluttered interface full of flashing adverts for a pile of crap you have no interest in. So The Shitfuckers have a new single out with a video I can watch? Big fucking deal.

And just when you've got used to MySpace, suddenly your friends are telling you that it's, like, totally passe, cause FaecesBook is where it's at now. Nobody who's anybody is using MySpace these days (yeah, so the percentage of those MySpaz messages that are spam is actually going up? No shit!) Still, you're always willing to give something new a try (cause the true cynic is cynical about cynicism, baby, ya dig?), so you set up that new FaceBook page. So now you have another online email account to check when you're arsing about in the morning looking for a displacement activity to distract you from writing. Peachy.

And FaceBook's full of crap as well. I mean, no offence, but all those invitations to play at being a vampire, werewolf, zombie, pirate or whatever? Nope. Just can't be arsed with them, I'm afraid. And Walls and SuperWalls and FunWalls and WonderWalls and AllInAllIt'sJustAnotherBrickInTheWalls. Nay, nay and thrice nay.

So after getting about ten friend requests on MySpam in a single day, and every one of them being for some XXX webcam bollocks I thought fuck this for a game of sodjies and torched the account. And after missing out on a mate's celebratory night out recently because the invite was sent through FarceBook and therefore forgotten about entirely (rather than filed in my "events" Outlook folder and added as a task with an automatic reminder), I decided to deep six that account too. Ultimately, if anyone wants to message me, my email address is easy enough to find.