I take it all back (well, most of it)

Despite having a MySpace profile for around a year now, I really haven't gotten much use out of it. I've used the comments to exchange witty photos of world leaders with Matt. I have a few musician friends who seem to find it useful to keep in touch with their fanbase. My brother uses it to discover new music and keep informed of upcoming gigs. I'd never really had much use for the site though. I need to meet someone in person, and several times, to decide if they are a friend, so the whole online networking/popularity thing doesn't really work for me. Communication through MySpace is a pain. I've never used their IM, but as I already have Yahoo!, MSN, Google, AIM, ICQ, Skype and several Jabber accounts, so I don't really feel a burning need for another. The site also offends my aesthetic sensibilities, which aren't terribly refined.

Thusfar, I've been friended by people that I'm already in touch with. People that I email or see on a regular or semi-regular basis. Today, however, that all changed. I came home to read my email and the message at the top of my inbox was "Jeff would like to be added as one of your friends!" I thought it was more MySpace spam (though, in fairness, that has gotten better lately). It turned out to be an old friend with whom I had lost contact and haven't seen in seven or eight years. Someone that I'd tried to find more than once online to see what he was up to.

So thanks, MySpace, for putting me in contact with a long lost friend. You're not the best designed or easiest to use social networking site on the web, but you're not as useless as I thought.

Update: Of course, I'm not terribly happy about the ongoing censorship on MySpace. Maybe I need to delete that account, after all.