Myspace is a great publicity tool, and it's also quite handy in terms of social networking with people you know due to the sheer size of it (and the fact it links in things like schools and employment records). Several of the people I used to work with and go to school with have contacted me on it.

That said, the user interface is pretty rubbish in my humble opinion, and the focus on one on one interaction instead of community interaction is not something I'm used to.

I can understand why the Livejournal generation tend to hate it, which includes my girlfriend. That said, Myspace is a mish mash of various different sites which have come before it, but it's done it in a very accessible way - it's like, what, the 2nd most used site on the internet now?

Can't anyone convince NF to switch to a less adolescent form of blogging?

That wouldn't really be smart for him, I suspect. He's doing it for visibility, and Myspace gives you the best visibilty online at the moment.

Nathan worked and is friendly with James Gunn and Jenna Fischer. They have pages at MySpace, and encouraged him to join. There were a lot of impersonators on MySpace, and by adding his own account (and having James Gunn confirm it really was Nathan), it pulled the rug out from under the impersonators' feet.

MySpace is essentially Buffistas, is the Bronze, is LJ. It is what you make it.

I don't like the interface much and don't like the looks of it. I don't like all the spam, and pronishness of it, but not only can you control who you add as a friend, you can control who adds you as a friend. You don't have to have a cleavage shot for your user picture. You can not add music, or set up your own music so it doesn't auto-play.

I'm pretty sure you can set up your profile so you don't automatically hear someone else's music, unless you choose to. You can set up your profile so people can't leave you HTML comments (which does away with a lot of the garbage).

I prefer regular blogging platforms, but I can see why it might be intimidating to set one up, particularly for someone who doesn't spend a lot of time online.

I joined MySpace so I could check in on my daughter's roller derby league. Other than that, I don't use it much. I don't blog on it, it's just kinda there.

Indeed, I don't accept friend requests from people I don't know, and there's an option so you don't get messages from people who aren't on your friend list. I have no music, fancy background and all that raz on it. I find it useful to keep up to date with friends with little effort, as it mails me when they blog (if I'm tracking their blog), and their photos and such are all in the same area. I don't use it to blog, and I don't have a blog anyway as the most interesting thing I've acheived in the last month is cutting my toenails.

I'm on myspace for firefly and my political stuff.

Haven't done much with it, but I've been considering crossposting some of my political blogging simply because it does have such a high profile.

I got an account purely because of Jenna Fischer's blog entries. She's adorable. There was a move to step up the VM fandom's presence on the 'net, so I added the cw's "character" pages, but I never really went anywhere with that. I just like to be able to see Jenna's pictures.

Jenna's a really nice person, at least from what I've seen online -- and she wins mega!bonus for being interesting and quite unusual (unconventional?) at times. Yeah, Joss Whedon's upcoming The Office episode best be good.

I'm so excited to find out that one is true, Kevin! I thought people got carried away by Joss's comment at Whedonesque, because it really could have been a stray comment. It wasn't exactly hard confirmation. But I've since read that the studio has confirmed it.

...Or have they? I don't want to perpetuate any 'splodey heads.