| I was thinking about it the other day, and I was trying to figure out what exactly made myspace more attractive to kiddos and adults alike versus xanga. What is surprising, is that it doesn't seem that xanga has done much to integrate these things either - maybe they consider it a lost cause?
At any rate... here we go -
Pictures... Oh Pictures. After all, that is what a large amount of our time is spent on myspace doing right? Xanga would only let you upload 3 pictures at limited file sizes back in the day... no commenting feature, no captions or embedded HTML. That was strike one...
Blog vs. The Bulletin. The bulletin lets people know what's up without telling them what you had for breakfast. I think everyone on xanga thought the same thing at the same time... why tell everyone everything? Teenagers just aren't naturally wired to "blog" (more so for guys than gals). We want to know the cool, condensed, and fun parts of things... it just didn't make much sense to run around reading people's blogs and what not.
Networking vs. Subscription. Subscriptions clog up you email and your page... It was kind of messy, and telling people apart based simply on the username (XxEMOXXFAGcoreXx) wasn't the easiest thing.
Page options... Myspace lets you do just about anything you want with your page. HTML, CSS, java and activeX... whatever the hell you want, you can do it. No such animal with xanga, embedding videos and music required separate hosting and more than a couple clicks of a button. Not everyone has explicit knowledge of HTML ya know :P.
A comprehensive messaging system. I don't use my email these days really... why? Because I have a myspace. If anyone wants to say anything to me, they know where to find me. And if they don't have a myspace... they aren't cool enough to talk to me anyways :). Xanga relied on comments and that was just weird and messy.
Pedophiles... myspace has so many more pedophiles. Duh...
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But there were a couple of things xanga did right. Among them...
A built in page generator - they localized their page generation, so you didn't have a bunch of other sites leaching off of layouts and contact tables and other random weird shit.
Xanga had less ads... myspace is such a whore for money :P.
Xanga had considerably better load times. Definitely due to the fact that they weren't serving as much data... but it would be nice for me to be able to navigate myspace without running into a TON of speed bumps along the way.
A much more personal feel... while blogging burnt a lot of us out, it gave us a deeper look into people's lives. I consider this a good thing, since really... for it to be bad, the poster has to be saying something that shouldn't be divulged. And that would be their own damn fault. The blog part of it all made for a great decompress at the end of the day... it was a nice little reflection on what you did that day.
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All in all, I wish I could combine the 2... but myspace has severely outweighed xanga for a while now - and I doubt we will ever get it back. That is... until myspace finally gets sued or something.
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| Its like visiting a time capsule or something. Looking at friends pages ands things...
Myspace killed xanga... Xanga had its own little quirks, things that made it cool I suppose. Damn, kinda sucks...
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I look doped up |
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| Reasons to go to Amarillo
Family
Cattle
Barbecue
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Reasons to live there... cattle.
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