As a webdesigner, or I guess as anyone who spends a lot of time working online, it’s easy to get a condescending view of tools that help people who know very little about the web create an online presence. It’s a childish and discriminative tendency, but time after time I fall into that trap and boycot tools like these for no good reason. The fact is, way back in the days when I knew very little about building websites, I used WYSIWYG editors and sliced-image table layouts. I used geocities, xoom, and angelfire to build my first pages. When I was first learning about content management, I even made use of blogger for a while. For some reason though, I had this disdain for LiveJournal. It was as if I thought I was technologically above it…until I found a friends LiveJournal page that I hadn’t seen since middle school. I realized then that it wasn’t just some toy for elementary school students, but rather a valuable tool for keeping up with friends.

For the longest time, I’ve had the same opinions about Myspace. I knew that some of my friends used it, but I refused to setup an account and insisted that they email or IM me. Well, after finally signing up a couple weeks ago, I again feel like I’ve been snob. There are a lot of people on Myspace that I know from my hometown, from high school, and from college. To make me feel even worse, the biggest group of friends (by far), are all the people from my Digital Media classes at UCF. These are people who now have cool jobs like designing rides at Disney, building 3d animation for gaming companies, and (like me) developing websites. So much for my theory. I’m just going to shut my mouth now and post my Myspace url: http://www.myspace.com/jasongraphix

For those of you reading out there with Myspace accounts, sorry for not doing this sooner. Go ahead and add me to your friend list if you haven’t already. If you don’t already have a Myspace account, here’s my shameless plug:

  • It’s free.
  • It’s easy to setup.
  • There are probably dozens of people on it that you already know (including myself).
  • You can use it as a blog if you don’t already have one.
  • You can customize the snot out of it. Honestly though, the only good example I’ve seen of this would be Chrissy’s profile.