I hope it will come as a shock to some of you that I have a MySpace account. (I'll probably post a link to it in the next couple of days on the sidebar of my Website since I want to tool with it a bit soon, but it's fairly easy to find it if you want to go looking for it now.) MySpace has the reputation that it has for a reason, and under normal circumstances that reputation would pretty much preclude me from ever using it. The only reason I ever got a MySpace account was because I needed one to look at photos that some friends had put on their accounts, and for a long time there I basically had next to nothing on my profile. I don't remember what eventually caused me to fill out a full profile -- I'm guessing boredom was the likely culprit -- but I do now have something resembling a typical MySpace profile now, albeit without a million annoying Flash plug-ins and Web graphics that were obnoxious ten years ago. (My only real concession is that I do have a Jill Tracy song on my profile, but I don't think that's too big of a deal.)
Surprisingly, I've actually found MySpace to be a useful tool. Although I don't see myself going full-bore into it anytime soon (such as reposting my blog entries over there), MySpace has enabled me not only to keep in touch with some friends in a much easier way than other communication methods, but I've also managed to get back in touch with quite a few old friends through my profile as well. I haven't had similar luck with my Facebook profile -- that's even more bare-bones than my MySpace profile -- but for all that MySpace is maligned by most of the people I know (for reasons I mostly agree with), I've still managed to find it a useful tool. In fact, the first two jobs I applied to that I got to the interview stage on -- director for a local art gallery and a paid internship with the Kucinich campaign -- were jobs that I was first alerted to through MySpace.
What's got me thinking about MySpace so much lately is this phenomenon that's developed over the past couple of years where movies will set up their own MySpace profiles, and, in some cases, actually advertise their MySpace profiles as their primary Websites instead of a standard domain. Although my memory isn't 100% perfect on this, I could swear that I've seen more than just the teen/young adult-oriented movies (which probably get better publicity to their target audiences through MySpace than an ordinary Website) doing this. It's almost as if MySpace has kind of usurped the Web as a whole, at least among a certain age group, and honestly I can't say that I'm too thrilled at this prospect simply because MySpace, by its nature, will never be as open as the Internet as a whole, to say nothing of who operates MySpace and what kinds of ideas and stuff they might wind up censoring one day.
Another thing that came to mind recently when I was thinking about movies setting up a MySpace profile as a primary Website is the old ".to domain" shortcuts. Several years ago it seemed like everyone I knew was getting a come.to or travel.to domain or something similar. Back before I set up the .org, I even had http://come.to/seanshannon point to the tiny personal Website I kept on the free hosting I got from the dial-up ISP I had at the time. (It now directs to the .org.) If movies can't secure the movie's name as a domain name because all the usual extensions are taken (e.g. titanic.com, titanic.net, titanic.org), you'd think that they might pick up one of the .to domains. Then again, in recent years I can only recall seeing one advertisement for a Website that used a .to domain, so perhaps MySpace has already far and away usurped that target market from the people who snatched up those .to domains.