The Folly of MySpace
Or, more accurately, a folly of MySpace…
So I’m doing this project that doesn’t quite necessitate the development of dozens of MySpace pages for fictional characters, but I swear to you it actually helps me with developing characters. There’s something very personal in the way people customize MySpace profile pages into eye-bleeding messes. I’ll never forget the guy I worked with, who seemed reasonably nice and good-humored. His MySpace page reminded me of trips into Vincent D’Onofrio’s mind in The Cell, and after that, being around him made me feel uncomfortable. Besides which, with all the questions and free surveys and shit, it forces you to answer questions about characters that Lajos Egrei would never think of. “Coke or Pepsi”? I mean, part of me says, “Who gives a shit?” but another part of me thinks, in some way, that is important. It’s like the cut scene from Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace deconstructs the personality type of an Elvis man versus a Beatles man.
I ran into a little snafu with my latest creation. Admittedly, it’s my own fuck-up, but it speaks volumes about MySpace’s half-assedness. It goes like this: I created a new account, but I misspelled the e-mail address. I don’t do this often, but I guess it’s kind of difficult to spell “girthmcdurchstein,” which is why I should probably just use Gmail for all these fake addresses.
I figured: okay, not hard. I’ll just go to my account settings and change the e-mail address. It’ll send a confirmation e-mail to the new address, and that’ll be that. Right?
Wrong. MySpace sends the confirmation to the old e-mail address, which I’ll admit makes some sense — you could easily hijack someone’s account and change their address — but in the case of someone trying to change an e-mail address that doesn’t exist, it makes things a little more difficult. So I say, “Fuck it, I’ll just cancel the account and start from scratch.” Again, MySpace sends a confirmation e-mail and will not cancel the account unless you confirm it.
At this point, you might be wondering why I didn’t just abandon the profile. It’s a brand new, friendless, shapeless account. Well, I had stupidly already filled in the MySpace URL for it, and I wanted to keep it. Besides which, I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to change the e-mail address.
Wrong. They have a thing on their FAQ telling you how to change your e-mail address if you don’t have access to the old one. It was simple: fill out a form with your old e-mail, account password, new e-mail, and an explanatory note (if necessary). Not hard.
Wrong. When I clicked SEND, MySpace told me all further correspondence would be sent to the old, nonexistent e-mail address. Keep in mind that this form specifically exists to change your e-mail address when you don’t have access to the old one. So fine, I redid the exact same form, only this time I put the real e-mail address in for both, with an explanatory note giving them the old one but telling them why I didn’t use it.
Within an hour, they sent me an autogenerated e-mail re-explaining what I had just done and telling me to do the exact same thing again, only this time I just had to hit reply and type out all the info.
I didn’t hear a thing for five days. After Googling around, I found two good solutions:
- Send them another e-mail saying something like “FIFTH ATTEMPT” in the subject line.
- Post a pornographic image as a comment on Tom’s profile, which will ensured your account gets deleted within minutes.
What the hell kind of system do they have where it’s easier just to get banned than it is to legitimately cancel your account or change your e-mail address?
Anyway, I took the former option (saving for the latter if it doesn’t work) and decided to put FIFTH ATTEMPT, even though it wasn’t. It took another full day before I received a response, another autogenerated e-mail that elaborates on what the FAQ says, telling me to create a “salute” with MYSPACE.COM and my Friend ID written on it.
This makes no sense. In every defense of MySpace’s ass-backwards system I’ve read, they say MySpace makes you go through all this annoyance and bother for security purposes. Like I said, it’s pretty easy to hijack the account, change to a different e-mail address the person you hijacked won’t know, and fuck up their profile. So all you have to do is send in your parents’ brains or write BRAINS on a 3x5 index card, and they give you the keys to the kingdom? How is this secure? Obviously the person hijacking the account knows it’s a MySpace account, so they have one half of the “salute” covered. Even if they couldn’t figure out how to find the Friend ID, it explains to you how to do this right there in the e-mail.
This can’t be a “security feature.” A security feature is popping up a “secret question” when you want to change your e-mail address or password — something a little harder to know than somebody’s e-mail address and current password. It doesn’t even make sense when you say “you have to take a picture of yourself holding it,” because how the fuck does MySpace know what you look like? Especially, like in my case, when you’ve uploaded no photos.
Fuck, with all this hassle — and I still haven’t received an e-mail saying my “salute” is good enough — I might as well just porn-spam Tom.
Or, you know, stop making MySpace pages for every half-assed character I create. But hey, I spent too much time Photoshopping images and uploading videos to quit now! The only thing it’s taught me is to be more careful when I type in the e-mail address upon signing up. Or to not do the perma-URL until I’ve validated my e-mail address (which they shouldn’t let you do, anyway).
Posted by Stan on May 19, 2008 4:03 PM | Permalink | Random Musings | Digg It
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