There was an article in Slate a few days ago about how young people no longer use email, preferring to use text messaging and MySpace or Facebook instead.
As I've said before, I don't think MySpace is much more than warmed over America Online.
To get my regular email, I click on mail.app, and after a few seconds pf downloading, there are all my latest messages. With MySpace, it's a different story.
I get my MySpace email by:
1. Clicking on my MySpace bookmark.
2. Waiting for page to load. There's the banner... there are the google ads... there's the outline for the match.com ad with a woman flirting with her monitor, eventually followed by the video clip itself... there are the announcements for MySpace 'events'... finally, when all the ads are loaded and I have my browser back... I can
3. Click on 'home,' wait for more ads to load... there's the dancing mortgage reindeer... and, when I have my browser back,
4. click on 'log in'.
5. Wait for more ads to load. Click on 'inbox.'
And so on. And all during this time, my mail is more or less 'trapped' in MySpace. I don't have local copies. If I cancel MySpace (or if, for some reason, MySpace closes my account), I lose my 'paper trail' of messages.
And as I've said before, MySpace is, from a visual standpoint, an abomination. Cluttered, counterintuitive and just plain ugly. FaceBook is better, I suppose – based on what little I've seen of it.
But I still believe these social networks are basically a fad, just as all-day AOL chat was in the nineties, and eventually they'll go away or evolve into something more usable and sane.
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