About two or three months ago Facebook exploded, almost literally. This is neither good nor bad in and of itself - Facebook is decent software. I am a bit sick of friend requests from people I barely knew in high school, but ultimately it’s not bad stuff, especially for keeping track of the increasingly disparate group of friends we all seem to have in these mobile and virtual days.

Annoyingly though, Facebook has utterly killed MySpace. I used to get four or five friend requests from new bands per day, now I get as many in a week. A friend of mine from work recently deleted her account altogether. Basically, we really only need one of these social networky things in our lives, if that, so given we are all Facebooked up to our eyeballs these days is it any wonder no-one can be arsed with MySpace? Of course it isn’t. MySpace was enormously popular for a bit, but this was despite itself in many ways. It is a very limited, horribly clunky and spectacularly ugly website. It is truly a horrible user experience - where Facebook is nice and tidy by comparison.

That said, I miss MySpace. Why? Well for the music. I didn’t use MySpace to keep track of friends or write posts about hating my teacher or what a smelly bitch Julie from Class 3C is. I signed up to be friends with every band I liked and used it to keep track of their announcements in one handy place. I used it to browse and preview new music, and discovered loads of new groups this way; for now, Facebook does none of this. I really, really miss this functionality and I wish someone would find a way to keep this alive.

Well, either Facebook, or whatever one of these fucking stupid things we’ll all be using at this time next year. These sites are useful, they really are, but they are only useful if they either have a strictly defined purpose like Last FM or if absolutely everyone is signed up to it like, it appears, Facebook. In other words, far from competition being a good thing, this is where a monopoly is to everyone’s benefit. I am going to be really pissed off in the almost depressingly inevitable circumstance that in six months’ time something else is going to be newer and cooler and quirkier and we are all going to make like rats and leap as one for some new ship - well, for at least as long as it takes that one to start listing dangerously, anyway.

These things are handy, but if they don’t either settle down or start talking to each other they are going to get right on my bloody tits. And how am I going to keep track of all my favourite bands now, you bastards?

Thank MySpace for Nathan Lawr - more from him in the coming weeks hopefully:
Nathan Lawr & the Mintoaurs - Make Yourself