Blog #3 - Randi Russell

So I decided to look at Myspace for my blog post. I am a little bit scarred from the experience since I haven't been to Myspace since probably freshman year of high school (7 years ago?). I was thinking that I would go to the Myspace homepage and it would be a replica of Facebook due to the popularity of Facebook nowadays. Contrary to my expectations Myspace hasn't changed that much since high school. The layout of the website is the opposite of professional. Users are allowed to use any backgrounds that they choose for their pages, which from what I saw was a wide array of flashy and colorful backgrounds. Peoples' pages are very informal and consistency is lacking across all pages. Every page I came across looked different and conveyed different information. People can really put anything that they want on their page including, their favorite music, videos, pictures, quizzes about themselves, etc.

I am not sure why but the idea of Myspace scares me a little bit compared to Facebook and other social networking sites. It seemed like a lot of people were friending people that they did not know. I saw a lot of posts on peoples' walls saying things like "thanks for friending me" and things that made it seem as if people were friending those that they did not know previously. Also, I only came across a couple of pages that wouldn't allow me to see the person's information. Myspace seems very public and it makes me nervous how much information people have on there that anyone can see. The other thing that scares me - I saw a lot of profiles that said the people were in their 20s, but their pictures looked as if they were 12 or 13. I'm hoping people are being responsible and parents are aware of things that kids put on there, but I am sure that doesn't happen much.