Letter to MySpace: We had a good thing, once.

On August 1, 2007, I broke up with my employer. There’s another post in me on that point, and it has something to do with why I haven’t posted here in exactly that long. But for now, I need to talk about MySpace. Because today, I broke up with her, too.

And it’s not because I was down-sizing my social relationships. In fact, I’ve upsized — at least in raw numbers. No, I broke up with MySpace because… well… I think she’s been cheating on me.

She hasn’t sent me a substantive message in months. All I get, every single day, are messages from other people she’s seeing, people hawking their bodily goods online, wanting to be my BFF. There was a time, not long ago, where people from my deepest past would find me on MySpace, would reach out to me, touch me in some new way. Not so, any longer.

In my letter, I was hardpressed to express any genuine loss for our relationship. There had been too many spam messages, too many sell-out banner advertisements, too much design confusion. It’s like… they let anyone in that place.

It didn’t have to be like this. I’d probably been content with things as they were, me in the dark, MySpace exploiting my obliviousness. But then I met Facebook. There was, at last, emotional consistency, stability, sanity. And right about the same time, many of my friends met Facebook, too.

But, what’s this? Good God, Facebook is selling out, too! Only months after I recussitate my long-held account there and begin using it regularly, Facebook launches it’s drive to join the widget craze that’s all over web 2.0 right now. What I had been so excited about in the beginning — the simplicity of our new relationship — has now been co-opted by others, developers who are telling me that just being in the Facebook community is not enough. Now, I have to be in their communities within the community. I thought just being online was enough?

I found Pownce, Kevin Rose and Company’s new answer to Twitter, and I’ve been looking at her with animal eyes of late. See, I realized, through my decimated relationship with MySpace, and my crumbling relationship with Facebook, that what I really want is a quick and easy place to keep up with my small network of friends, and get a quick peek at my larger neighborhood of acquaintences. Pownce: she may be the answer. (I have plenty of invites to this alpha party — please write me if you’d like to join.)

So, to my point. The quest to monetize turns good web 2.0 services into whores. Whether it’s MySpace’s spurious relationship with content providers or Facebook’s sellout attempt to be an online operating system, these sites seem to have lost sight of what made them so interesting in the first place: the networks.

So, I’m back to my little Black Book. I haven’t cracked this open in a while and… wow. No, she wouldn’t be interested. Would she? I still have an account with her… and she still sends me interesting messages every now and again. Could it be the only semi-interesting model of a social networking site that is still in business is the venerable… LinkedIn?

Ah, the more things change, indeed.