• Problems with MySpace Alternatives

    I am hair’s width away from leaving MySpace for good. Day after day, I’ve put up with the sexual advertising. No more. I’m done. MySpace shows no respect toward the people who use it. I had joined a MySpace group called “Tom, Change the Advertising!” That got us nowhere even though thousands of people have joined that group.

    I have checked my CultureFeast web analytics and discovered that the number one phrase people typed in to search engines which brought them to CultureFeast was “MySpace alternatives”. That says a lot. I only wrote maybe two blogs about MySpace alternatives. But people out there are looking, sampling, and hoping to find a product that can do what MySpace can do without the dating ads with scantily clad men and women.

    Seriously, those ads make the dating services look like ePimps (yes, that’s my word). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – MySpace may make a lot of money from those ePimp ads, but they’d have a lot more customer respect if they chose to advertise gadgets, vacations, mortgages, clothing brands (non-slutty), or cars. How many companies would love to market to 80 million people online (that was just a random number I pulled out of thin air. I have no idea how many members there are currently on MySpace).

    Alternatives cause unfortunate consequences. The more MySpace alternatives there are, the more people are spread out among various social networking sites. You might choose Friendster, but the people you want to find are hiding somewhere out there on Xanga, MyPraize, Utherverse, Tagged, Studybreakers, Bebo, Youthnoise, Youblab, Yfly, LinkedIn, Buzznet, Schoolster, JournURL, Palbook, HelloWorld, eventSherpa, imeem, and at least a hundred others. How will you ever find the people you’re looking for?

    That’s the problem with MySpace alternatives. It spreads everyone out too thin. People don’t have the time to log on to 20 or 30 different social sites daily just to keep up with everyone. Someone has to decide which is the premier site… and they have. MySpace is number one. That leaves those of us with morals S.O.L.

    I love my wife and cannot continue to visit a website that parades flirty chicks in my face. Sorry. Until someone with influence shifts the tides of people elsewhere, I’ll be floating out in cyberspace without a home. Well, my blogs are home now.