A while back I was obliged to create a Myspace account. A few friends of mine have them, and posted some pictures of a recent trip they put on their Myspace account. Their site was set to be exclusive to members, so I had to make an account in order to see the pictures. I figured they had a reason for locking their site that way, and it was free to sign up so it seemed reasonable enough to just make an account rather than make them change their permissions.

It all worked and I got to see the pictures. However, now I have this Myspace account that I really have no intentions of using. I figured it would just sit there quietly and not be a problem, and who knows maybe I’ll use it again to view content on Myspace.

Myspace itself didn’t send me anything about it. Not long after I started receiving friend request e-mails. I know they meant well with it, just reaching out to a new person in the community. At first it felt nice to be welcomed in like that. Knowing full well I’d never use the account, I’d reply explaining the situation.

There’s a lot of people on Myspace though, so getting that word out was pretty slow. I was getting around ten friend requests every week. Enough that it was worth creating a spam rule to block them, except it was just people being nice and it felt rude to just ignore them. Responding meant logging into th account and using their message page to reply, which was more effort than I wanted to put into it. I ended up canceling the account to stop the messages. I suppose if ever I need to see something on there I’ll have to recreate it, then delete when I’m done.

The thing I wonder though is, why did I get so many requests? At first I figured it was a welcoming to the community, but then it should have died off after a week or so. I think I had the account for a little over a month, and it never showed any signs of stopping. There were no links to the site, I never put up any content, it sat completely unused all that time. How did all those strangers find out I had an account? What made them want to be friends with someone who obviously isn’t putting any time or effort into it?