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Like the stereotypical car sales men from the 90’s, many websites of today show and tell you many things to get you to create an account with them. You are even sometimes sent a “Thank you!” e-mail, making sure you feel so special that you tell your neighbors about your adventure of joining a cool website. And then it happens. After hours, days or weeks, you lose interest, or you get harassed like a bunny. You decide to cancel and delete your account. That is when you realize that breaking up from a 20-year old relationship may be easier than canceling and deleting an online account.

Many websites like PeoplePC.com seem to make you call customer support in order to cancel your account. Why do you have to call the billing department to cancel your account when you are allowed to create your account online? There can be many reasons why some websites do not close your accounts. Some websites simply do not have that functionality available on a wide-scale, while other websites want to keep the number of open accounts high in order to attract investors. Still, other websites simply focus on people creating accounts and making purchases through those accounts, and people not wanting to remain on the site anymore are not part of their focus at all. Whatever the reason, in the end, you are usually left with an online account with your name, username, password, e-mail address, home address, phone number and many other pieces of private information sitting on an information bank, probably waiting to be utilized at some future date.

Some online services which do not allow you to completely close and delete your account.

The following websites offer no way to delete your account. They do not offer any information as to how you can delete your account permanently and completely, and e-mailing their tech support does not seem to help either.

• Art .com. I e-mailed Art.com asking them to delete my account, and as a response, I got instructions on how to unsubscribe from their newsletter. Of course, I am still getting the newsletter, and also have an account there that I cannot close.
• Performancing Ads .com. There is absolutely no way to delete your account, and their help pages have no information on the words “delete“, “close” and “deactivate.“
• Oovoo .com. I e-mailed and contacted Oovoo support to delete my account and was told that the only way to do that was to:

  “go to FILE/EDIT MY OOvOO CARD/ Once there please remove any personal information, your picture (by replacing it with something else), and your email address (enter a bogus one). Please also change your display name to “inactive”. Click “Save”, and then just abandon the account. This will close it.” –according to ooVoo staff Dave.

  I realized and found out that the above comment meant that Oovoo does not allow you to completely delete and close your account and personal information. All it offers is to change some of your private information to bogus information and to simply not login. Of course, your own personal ooVoo username can never be changed and remains active forever.



• FedEx .com . FedEx allows you to create an online account to track packages, send packages and create personal and business accounts for shipping and delivery. FedEx, unlike UPS, does not offer a way to delete and close your “My FedEx” account at all, resulting in all your information stored forever on the FedEx website.
• Anthropologie.com. The famous clothing and home apparel store website does not offer any account or personal information deletion feature. All your anthropological purchases are saved forever, just like the field of anthropology would love it.



• eBay group subscriptions. If you are subscribed to any eBay group and then you delete your account, your group subscriptions can remain active. That means eBay will keep emailing you the eBay group announcements, replies, and other notifications. Contacting support will not help at all, as I have experienced so far.
• iStockPhoto .com . The famous royalty stock photo website allows you to create and account and either sell or buy pictures. It does not, however, allow you to realize that you can stop being interested in their service and can delete your online account there. You can find dozens of links telling you to buy subscriptions and pictures. You will find zero links to tell you how you can close your iStockPhoto account.



• Zooomr .com. While there is no information whatsoever as to how a Zooomr account can be completely closed, there is information on Zooomr help groups about people having their Zooomr account disabled without any explanation and Zooomr ignoring such people publicly on the discussion forums. People’s requests to have their Zooomr accounts deleted have been ignored and unanswered for months on the Zoomr groups.
• Alaska Airlines .com. Many online airlines like American, United and SouthWest allow travelers to create and manage online airline accounts related to their miles and memberships. At the same time, however, airlines like Alaska Air and Jet Blue do not allow users to delete their online airline accounts. Once again, easy to book an airline ticket and an online airline account, and very hard to cancel either.



• DeviantART .com. DeviantART does not allow you to delete your account. Just like Oovoo, you can only edit some of your existing information and replace it with bogus information. You can also manually delete all your DeviantART content. Your DeviantART account stays alive forever, however.
• PeoplePC .com. There may be reasons to believe PeoplePC tries to ignore people who want to cancel their PeoplePC account.
• Pizza Hut .com. Your hunger forces you to go online and order 2 large pizzas, 8 bread sticks, 8 spicy chicken wings and 2 large Sprites. However, when it comes to deleting your online PizzaHut.com account login and related information, neither hunger nor starvation can help you. There is no link to delete your PizzaHut.com account, and asking any Pizza Hut staff at any Pizza Hut location makes that staff member want to call the center for disease control because of your strange question.



• Buy.com . Like many other websites, Buy.com makes it extremely easy to sign up for an account. However, there is absolutely no information whatsoever as to how you can delete all your personal information from their site, and how can you can permanently close your account.

Above are some of the thousands of online websites and services which do not allow you to delete your online account with them easily, or at all.

Would you like the ability to delete your online accounts on different websites?

Searching online can help figure out whether others online have instructions to help delete different online accounts. So why do these websites themselves do not allow you to easily close your account? Should not the happiness and convenience of a potential client or even a visitor be kept in mind, even when they are leaving you? Should not the idea of being able to close an account be as easy as opening an account?

Please let me and others know what you think by sharing in the comments below.

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you, and I hope you can get your unwanted online account deleted. As for me, I am off to e-mail the wonderful Orbitz and Priceline people to see if I can beg them to close my accounts.

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Poll for you and your future and existing job:

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Does social network profiling result in discrimination and prejudice?

It is interesting to see that more and more companies are starting to think that your behavior outside of the workplace is an important factor to consider when figuring out whether or not you are useful to the company and your job. My question is: What does the non-work online life of anyone have to do with the work life? Employers should only care about something that affects the workplace or the job at hand by following the golden rule: mind your own business.

Can employers and interviewers use the social profiles of job applicants and employees as a way to base biased decisions against the stereotypically-stereotyped people, like homosexuals, females, minorities, politically minded, certain races, and more?

Employers should not care about the online social activities of employees outside of the workplace.

Employers have to learn how not to judge an employee because of a social online account not related to work. Employers also have to come up with better ways to analyze candidates than to use online posts of employees and candidates as one of the main deciding factors. Many times, if not most, using MySpace or social profiles as a way to “weed out” candidates is a cheaper and faster way for interviewers and others to not do the extra work of figuring out who is a good applicant for the job at hand.

According to a CareerBuilder survey in June of 2009, “Forty-five Percent of Employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. Jennifer Van Grove on Mashables says “Though this may seem as a big downer for those of us who are oversharers, the reality is that there’s still opportunity to use your social presence to land that job.”

Background online profiling can be the same as stalking

Snooping around to check an existing or prospect employee’s private or online life, which may have nothing to do with one’s work, is the same as stalking employees or prying into places which should not be used for judging the professional working ability of someone.

This may mean that the act of checking the social profiles may be considered bad in more than just the “unethical” banner, like considering it stalking. One example is an employer cyberstalking his restaurant employee in a private discussion group on MySpace, built solely to vent and share the personal frustrations at work, and then using her private posts as a basis for firing her.

Employers are also known to create fake accounts just to find out more information about private accounts of workers. BBC has a story of a woman recently fired because of being on Facebook through her iPhone while resting in bed, after she had taken a day off from work for being sick. She says that one of her mysterious Facebook friends online was probably one of her co-workers or boss, who mysteriously vanished from her Facebook friends list after she got fired. While there is a lot of focus on the general media advising the general public to either not post many things online or to protect such online postings further, there has been a slow increase in the amount of attention people are giving to the idea of suing employers for discriminating against and stalking the online profiles of potential and existing employees.

The same way following a person to bars, the public park, library, movie theaters and other places is a form of stalking and does not contribute in any significant manner, in many cases, to the value and integrity of an employee, should employers snoop around the online public profiles of job applicants and existing employees, when such profiles are not related in any manner to the employer or a job?

Censorship is the main reason many employers check employee’s social profiles

One of the reasons employers monitor their worker’s profiles is because of censorship: many employers do not want their employees to say anything bad about the company outside of the workplace, as BBC Video reports in the case of 16 year old Kimberley, who got fired by Ivell Marketting & Logistics for saying on facebook “ma job it poingLESS” to her friends. Kimberley’s co-workers had forwarded Kimberley’s Facebook status updates to their boss.

Also, companies seem to be taking extreme action even if someone voices a strong disapproval of the company actions. A very good example of this is Dan Leone and his facebook account. Dan Leone was fired from his job as a game-day employee for voicing his disapproval of the team on his Facebook account. No one sat down with Dan, and he was not offered a chance to express his side of the story and the situation. It should be known that the thousands of Eagles fans voiced the same exact opinion that Dan did. The only difference was that Dan was working for the very organization that he voiced an opinion against.

Another example, as reported by CNN, is of anonymous bloggers being fired by their companies and employers for having blogs and for posting opinions on them. Also, CNN itself has fired senior producer Chef Pazienza for having his own opinionated blog under his own name while working for CNN and not adhering to CNN’s journalism standards. It should be noted that Chef’s blog is personal, and was not in any manner related or competing with the “journalism” offered by CNN.

What logic is used to consider unrelated online activities as being 100% related to work performance?

My question to all the employers and other people suggesting that people should be careful in their online activities because of the impact of such online details over one’s job: Why? Why should one be scared to post stuff online? What about in countries, like in Europe, where smoking a joint or eating hash cookies, is legal? Would posting pictures of someone smoking hash in Europe get them into trouble in Florida?

What logic and reason, including any logical connection, exists between posting a picture of yourself smoking a joint, and with your actual job performance? Why should an outside bias against any action be allowed to affect our image of someone’s working professional life and qualities, when the two have not intersected so far? Should employers and interviewers allow their own personal judgment and any opinion of things like smoking a joint, affect and cloud their judgment over completely unrelated things like a job performance?

Overall, the very question of whether or not employers should look at such profiles, when they are unrelated to the work at hand, should be brought up in order to make sure that the unrelated activities of people do not affect their job prospects because of the employers putting unnecessary emphasis on such online profiles.

Random examples of online social profiling resulting in bias and prejudice

Different things that are used to form biased judgments about someone’s working abilities can include the following.

• A person cannot drink on a job but drinks every night at home and at parties and gets wasted. Is that a disqualifier for an existing job? Will religious or other interviewers who are opposed to drinking count this into their final interview decision, yet still say that the online profile of the applicant does not play a “significant” role in the hiring process?
• A person goes around smoking marijuana in Europe but has a perfect job and professional record around their city of work. Should they be disqualified by someone who is against illegal drugs in America?
• A person has had more than one abortion and posts publicly about it on her blog. Would a pro-life interviewer have any interest in checking our her blog when the job may be about something like computer hardware repairs?
• Would a “hard core republican” have his chances of employment at a “hard core democrat” management corporation ruined because of his pro-republication status messages on twitter?

Such points and interests can give interviewers prejudice, since such points are usually pursued by employers and interviewers for no reason other than to find out anything bad that the employer or the interviewer may not agree personally outside of the workplace. Employers and interviewers usually say that they do not use online social profiles as an important element in deciding whether or not someone should be an employee. My question to employers and interviewers: If online social profiles do not affect your judgment in a hiring process, as you, the employer and the interviewer claim so many times, why do you check out the social profiles of people in order to find out qualities, like what a person does at 11pm, which has nothing to do with what a person may do between the stereotypical hours of 9am and 5pm?

Many employers are spending heavy resources on finding out what kind of MySpace and Facebook pictures job applicants and existing employees have on their MySpace and Facebook profiles, instead of interacting with those people directly to find out what kind of job qualities and skills they have.

Is checking an employee’s or potential job applicant’s online social accounts, if those accounts are not related to work, the same as stalking and cyber-stalking someone? Many entities think that spying on people is an acceptable behavior. An example of this on a massive government level is the case of the city of Bozeman in Montana asking all existing and prospect employees to hand over their usernames and passwords to their Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking accounts. A Millersville University teacher Stacy Snyder was denied a teaching credential because of her online MySpace picture, shown to the right, which shows her drinking beer with a pirate cap on.

A so-called conservative interviewer could disqualify a job applicant who drinks heavily every other night and posts the pictures on MySpace, while a very so-called liberal interviewer could then disqualify a job applicant who preaches about religion a lot through their blog. A Christian employer could deny a job to a Muslim job applicant who talks openly about the war in Iraq on Twitter, while a Muslim employer could deny a job to a Jewish job applicant who talks openly about Palestine and Israel on their Facebook. A gay interviewer could deny a job to someone who is against same-sex marriages through their Facebook groups, while a religious man-to-woman-only-marriages employer could be harsh on a gay job applicant who runs and promotes pro-same-sex-marriage groups on MySpace. A white interviewer could ignore a black job applicant who runs pro-affirmative-action groups on Xanga, while a black employer could deny a promotion to a white or a non-black person who runs anti-Obama groups on LiveJournal. In all these and other cases, a stereotypical person could easily use the non-work related online social profile activity trait of a worker as a way to affect the work-related progress of that worker in a completely unrelated real of someone’s life.

According to the article “Googling your Nanny” on Care.com, in which caretakers were asked if they were comfortable having their non-work related MySpace, Facebook and other online accounts researched by parents who wanted a caretaker, people like Erika W. said “I think it’s a great idea because then parents will know if their babysitter is honest and responsible! I’m a great babysitter, so please come check out my profile!” while people like Dawn said “MySpace and Facebook are about friends and child care is about work. Obviously at your job you’re going to be professional and attentive to the children…The things I do in my personal life have no reflection on the things in my professional life. ”

What Jason Falls thinks about online profiles, employers and employees

Here is a very interesting presentation Jason Falls about your online social accounts, and how they are visible to employers,.

Employers should pay heed to employees directly, and not the online social stereotypes

Employers and interviewers should stop using social profiles and non-work related habits of people as one of the main ways to figure out whether or not an employee is fit for a job. Employers and interviewers should actually be fired for relying too much on online social profiles instead of their own offline abilities to figure out whether or not an employee will do good at work, and whether or not the actual work, educational and other skills of the employee would help the company and employer in question.

Val Calvert says “You wouldn’t air your dirty laundry in the backyard, so why would you air your dirty laundry on MySpace?” My question: how are those two things related? MySpace is a personal profile for many, and if someone wants to post something personal about themselves online, why should an outside employer, who is not part of the personal life and only part of the professional life, decide to use that information to form judgments about the working qualities of an employee or an applicant? Also, Jason Falls considers people who smoke joints in their pictures to not have a job soon. That is a very important thing to consider, because of the stereotypical trend in the business world where employers and interviewers assume that the online life of a person should greatly help in deducing whether or not a job applicant or employer is a good candidate for the future.

Kit Eaton at Fast Company talks about the unjust horrors of not censoring your Facebook page from your future and current employers. Of course, more and more companies have already been firing people because of social media, as mentioned before by Doug Caverly of WebProNews. Mark Glover of The Sacramento Bee says that employers must set up online social networking ground rules for employees to follow.

My question to everyone who wants employees to hide and change their life habits online solely because of upsetting an employer: If something is online and accessible, like the social profiles of job applicants, should employers simply take such information and use it as an element in their analysis of the prospect employee?

The online activities of employees, if not related to actual work, should be ignored by employers.

The act of expressing ourselves online is being used against us by entities which would prefer us to express things they want to express in order to promote their image and business in the personal lives of people, outside of the workplace. That is prejudice and unjust bias, similar to what many entities experience because of their background culture, race, color, religion, political views, gender, sex, and age. To put it simply: the idea of being able to express ourselves, using the online world, is being discriminated against and targeted heavily.

Do you think it is important to put emphasis on the social profile and online activities of a job applicant? Does the “Getting wasted Friday night & barfing all over the car” picture of a job applicant affect their performance at work? Should a company really require you and other employees to exhibit a typical “professional” attitude throughout your life, outside of the workplace? Are employers and interviewers putting too much emphasis on the public image of their employees than the job performance and potential of those employees? Is such a trend, of heavily factoring in the social profiles of job applicants into the interview process, a sign of the non-adapting nature of corporations and workers who want to hire drones that exhibit a workplace attitude 24 hours a day? Are interviewers and employers discriminating and being unethical when searching out and profiling your online social profiles?

Just because you are an employee of a company, it is not a stated fact, nor should it be a requirement, to never have feelings or judgments against the company you work for. Businesses should not ask for blind patriotism, nor should employers enforce a robotic environment where any emotion that the company, as a money making machine does not share, results in the termination of such emotion holders.

Have you ever been asked or told by an interview or an employer about anything related to your social profiles? Have you ever had your social profile researched and viewed by employers, interviewers or co-workers and then brought to your attention?

Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. Now I must go and try to take a few pictures of some toys so that I can post them online to share with everyone in the professional and non-professional world.

Thank you for reading. I really appreciate it.

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What happens when you stop going online? Your online status accounts on Facebook, Twitter, BrightKite and other places will look like they have not been updated in a while. Your e-mail accounts may start bouncing, because some free e-mail accounts deactivate if you have not logged in for 3 months. If you have your own website and an e-mail account related to that website, your website may go offline within 2 months due to non-payment of the monthly hosting fees. That can be a big clue that you are either going offline, or that you are really going offline. A lot of people then may start assuming that either you have changed your domain name, or that you have decided to take a break from the online world. Some people may immediately start wondering if you have also decided to take a break from the offline world.

Do you have a backup plan?

In cases of death, or in cases of not being able to go online anymore, some people may be inclined by the idea of coming up with a backup plan to have their online accounts taken care of. Do you have a backup online plan that deals with the fate of your online accounts in case you die? Would you want someone specific to get access to all your passwords and accounts so that they can continue your posting frenzy? Is there any entity out there that you would want to go online to tell the rest of the world that the amazing you has passed away? Who would take care of your online accounts? Who will voluntary take care of them?

Online services to share your secrets, with your approval, after you die

A service called Death Switch aims to help you with this exact backup plan. After you sign up with them, you will tell Death Switch what kind of an e-mail and what attachments to e-mail if you die or go missing. The service sends you e-mails on a regular basis which you have to check and click links within. If you stop clicking the links in those e-mails, for reasons like death or boredom, the service will eventually send your super secret e-mail, that you dictated when signing up for the service, to the people of your choice. Such an e-mail can contain secrets, long lost thoughts, and even the picture of the real Zodiac. Legacy Locker, Great Good Bye and Vital Lock are other such services that offer either service plans, to meet the needs of ever dying soul that wishes to transmit information from beyond the grave, like Sadako.

One sole use of the services like Death Switch and Legacy Locker could indeed be to share your passwords with someone, because, as Elinor Mills for Cnet reported, not sharing passwords can result in more headache than many people realize after they die. While the analysis of the overall “If I die what will happen to my twitter account?” thought and reviews of services like Legacy Locker are interesting, it is even more interesting to question if we should actually care about the online world in case of our deaths or amazing disappearance.

Are automated notify-after-your-death services necessary in your life?

However, since such services are automated, what if you simply go on a vacation without remembering that you have to click on the verification links? What if you lose all your passwords in a laptop fire? Regardless, any form of a backup plan that involves sending messages to specific people in case of your disappearance, or online inactivity can result in your “Yes, I am gay!!!“, “You SUCK as a boss you $^#*@(@& @)@*@* – I hope you rot in hell & I &*( on your corpse from heaven!!“, and “I married you to be close to your older brother….” e-mails will surely reach the shining and living e-mail inboxes of your parents, your boss and your spouse. And they may indeed make your life more amazingly complex if you were on vacation and forgot about clicking the verification links from the above services.

What Ryanne Lai shows happens to your e-mails after you die

Here is a nice presentation by Ryanne Lai as to what happens to something like your e-mails after you die:

What happens to your online things in case you do not take care of them?

The idea of figuring out what to do with something like a website and an e-mail account has been around for a while. Dylon Boyd from Eroi.com has already asked “What the heck happens to your email accounts when you die?” MSNBC has asked the question “After your death, how will the information be located?”

Now comes a very important question. What happens to your Facebook account after you die? What happens to your MySpace, Twitter and Flickr accounts? What happens to your ICQ and AIM accounts? What happens to your Yahoo Mail and Hotmail e-mail accounts? What do you think will happen to them, and what would you like to happen to them? If you do not have a backup plan, will you be able to let someone know about your online accounts, if you wish, right before your death bed, or the ambulance bed? Even more interesting, what happens to your computer after your death?

Can you be an Online Account Donor?

Like Organ donors, would you be willing to donate your online account to a worthy cause? Would you give your MySpace account to your friend, or the Red Cross if they could use it to promote their services? Would you want anyone else to have your online account once you die? Would you donate your online account, whether it be your e-mail or your Facebook account, to a relative, a company, a friend, a neighbor, or a randomly stranger on the first bus that passes your house after 48 hours of your death, picked randomly by a lottery number? Would you be willing to carry around a government-issued, or a self-printed picture id, with the words “Bes The Online Account Donor – details on my MySpace & Facebook profile!” card? Would you like to an an Online Account Donor? You would, of course, have the choice of donating all of parts of your online accounts, like donating your Facebook photos area to someone, and your notes area to someone else. Theoretically, of course.

Should you have a backup plan?

Now comes the real question from my thought. Is there any need for you to let anyone online know that you are dead? Do people want to go on their Twitter accounts and see “Hey, this is Kylie’s friend. He r died! I r za new acount ownar! add meee biatches! xoxo“? Do people want to get up at 2am and check their Facebook friends feed to read “Phil has died“, with a way to give a thumbs up vote to that news entry and a way to remove the dead Phil from your living friends list? Heather Spencer, from the OK Gazette, says that “closing out your Facebook, blog and Twitter accounts must be added to the list” of things the family and friends of a deceased person must address. If any of such family members or friends do decide to close your account, should they let everyone else know that you are dead?

We can compare this briefly to your offline ideas of death, if you have any. Do you have an offline will? Now, regardless of the answer to that question, would you like to have an online will? Do you have any messages to share with others once you die? Should you have any will or directions for anyone to have your passwords transferred to someone after your death? Any messages to be posted on your site? Should you have such plans?

If you die, will anyone online find out about it? If you die, what will happen to your online accounts?

So we are now at the main big question. If you die, what will happen to your online accounts? Is that something you should think about? Is it something that you think may be something important to consider? Or do you think letting online people know about your death is not important? Do you think it is not important to have your online accounts taken care of after your death? If you die, what will happen to your online life? What happens to your emails, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, pictures, writings, any online earnings or files, etc? Would anyone online find out about your death?

One thing is for sure: If you die, your online accounts will surely find out about it through inactivity and the absence of love or abuse. Ohhh, the trauma for your online accounts!

Please let me know what you think, or if you have any questions, comments, or anything else on your mind, you can share them by leaving a comment below. I now have to go and see where the offline world takes me.

Thank you for reading. I really appreciate it.

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Do we act like tourists in the online world?

In the online world, many people know what e-mail is, so the concept of talking about basic e-mail technologies is very simple and normal for many people. What if, however, we run into someone online who does not know anything about e-mails? Will we treat them as a tourist? Will we treat them as being someone who do not know common things? Does the concept of not knowing something mean that we need to learn it completely, or does it mean that we can act like tourists? Is it possible for us to behave in some specific manner online that can create an impression that we are outsiders, that we do not belong there?

What if we did not know about some online website or medium, like Facebook, that millions of other people know about? How do we go about interacting with new online technologies and topics that others may be very familiar with, yet we ourselves may have no prior knowledge about? Do we all simply head for the “Help” section on new websites and issues, or do we act like the stereotypical tourists and ask for help? Do we act differently, going through pages that only a newcomer would go through, or do we browse new websites very comfortably like any “regular“?

Do you do things online that offline tourists do in new places?

Do we have any online equivalents of having flash cameras? Do we have any online equivalents of carrying a big map around with us? Do any of us have any online equivalent of the stereotypical tourist habit of having a small backpack or a fanny pack around our waists? Do we notice ourselves doing things online that catch the attention of others in a manner that embarrasses us because such attention shows that we may not know something that others, the locals, do? Do such and similar behaviors online make us a tourist?

Do you act like a tourist online? Do you act like a local who knows things? Is it possible to act like a tourist online?

Please let me know what you think. I now have to go and see if I can act like a tourist on Facebook before I head off to Burger King drive-thru and order some special burgers with extra napkins. Just like a tourist.

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Stupid Online People and Stupid Offline People

While Stupid Online People may seem to have no influence on you once you go offline, in reality, SONPs have a lot of power on you in your daily life. You go online to check your e-mail, your BrightKite, your Twitter, and your Facebook. And then all of a sudden, without any warning, you get a message from a Stupid Online Person.

That is where the trauma begins. Stupid Online people want you to listen to them. Stupid Online People are different than Stupid Offline People, SOFP, in one main area: the level of the portrayal of stupidity varies when it is exhibited aggressively. Online, it can be hard to realize whether one is smart or stupid or something else because people are known to type things that they really do not mean. Online, many people are also not that good at realizing what is going on. Offline, people can try to act smart and you can think to yourself “Oh my lord! What a damningly stupid biatch this person is!”

Why Stupid Online People Thrive Through Online Stupidity

For many people, the online world of stupidity offers an escape route that can be easily clogged in the offline world. It is easy to tell everyone online that you are so beautiful, that people get close to you just to have sex. Words alone can do wonders for many people, and people will offer you comfort in the form of “Aww I understand, many people are just into your body and not your mind! awww aw aww!” Other stupid online people will simply tell you how they are always there for others, and how no one is there for them. This results in the “Aww you need to focus on yourself more! It’s ok to be selfish, really! You’re such a wonderful person!”

Still, other stupid online people will tell you about all of their previous relationships and friends within a few minutes of meeting you online. They also tell you all the secrets of all other people, and they also proclaim that you are the best and most honest person they have ever met. And all of this happens while typing, while meeting you for the first time, and within 5 minutes of you adding that person to your contacts list.

Stupid Online People: Your Worst And Most Boring Online Nightmare?

Stupid Online People show a very immature and ugly side, combined, when you start being cautious around them instead of doing everything they want you to do. They get mad if you do not reply to them within 10 seconds. They get upset if you stop saying hi to them first thing in the morning. They get mad if you move them from #4 to #5 on your MySpace top 10 list. They start showing a very weird and ugly side of jealousy when they notice you are talking to someone else on Facebook chat. The typical “Ohh you’re a very busy person, ok I’ll ttyl!” comes into play when they ask you about your inability to respond within 10 seconds, and after you tell them that you were replying to someone on MySpace. Yes, Stupid Online People want you, all of you, and nothing else. And they want one of the top 4 spots on your MySpace friends list.

What do you think of the idea of being part of or knowing Stupid Online People?

What do you think? Do you know any stupid online people? Could you be on your way to becoming a stupid online person yourself? What is your view on the existence of stupid online people in your contacts list? Would you rather know Stupid Online People or Stupid Offline People? How do you deal with stupid people in general, online and offline?

Thank you for reading. I have to go now and swim through the friends-request list on Facebook, MySpace and BrightKite, among other places. I am also thinking of finding and adding a few new friends on those networks myself. And then I have to go meet some offline people who want me to go visit them and drive them about a minute from their house to the nearby coffee shop so they can get coffee for themselves because they are too tired to walk.

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1. You twitter when you don’t want to.

   “I don’t wanna twitter”, as tweeted by “@Miles10001“, @viiviiviivii, “@isdown, and the rest of the twitter world.

   If you do not want to do something and do that something to show that you do not want to do it, while not doing it to do it but to do it to show you do not want to do it, you may be addicted. This is one of the first signs of becoming addicted to twitter.

2. You twitter when you shouldn’t.

   Sometimes you twitter things you should not tweet about. Or maybe they come out with a different meaning for the other tweetopides. Looking at the reasons behind such tweets helps in finding out why such a tweet came to existence. Even then, with the reason in our clear view, it is still easy to usually see how one can tweet about the following things because of feeling very comfortable, or uncomfortable, with Twitter. Either way, one is using twitter to express their most important wishes at that exact moment, which may later come to haunt them back according to the typical society.

   Here are some examples of tweeting things that may not be said or done outside of twitter that much. I do not know these tweeters personally, so I am not sure if they can say such things outside of twitter too. If they do, then they are even bigger twitter addicts than shown here. More power to their twittering!

   “I want to kill him” – by @lywardach, @sohberline and @squince. I do not know about you, but I would personally have to consider Twitter my personal or open diary before I say such a thing. I am almost there, and my target for this very example is the neighbor’s cat. The day you see “I want to kill that damn cat!” by me, expect the biggest twitter addiction you may have possibly witnessed. Maybe you are already witnessing it.

   “I cheated on my boyfriend” by @Bridget291. Confessions are awesome, because they can be used to undermine the very thing one is confessing about. Thanks for confessing, @Bridget291! Hmmmm, she was truthful enough to confess! Any guys out there wanting to confess? Or are many guys not yet that addicted to twitter to start confessing about cheating? Hmmm.

3. You break up, divorce and end relationships via twitter, and on twitter.

   This is the new you. Why go say “We’re done!” in person and get slapped or chased when you can do it more efficiently and safely via twitter? Sure, doing it via text messages work too, but then you get a creep or a non-creep calling you for an explanation. You can do it via e-mail, but e-mails also result in e-mail replies, phone calls, text messages and door bells.

   The best way to break up is via twitter, the way Jerine & I just did via twitter today:

   @JerineLay, sorry, but I’m breaking up with you! It’s not me, it’s not you, it’s twitter! Twitter is always there for me! [1]
   @besz, i wasn’t even dating you! %&**$^*($# [2]
   @JerineLay yes, that’s good. The faster we move on, the better We’re still friends, right? ^^ [3]
   @besz, no I’ve deleted you from Facebook! You’re not a friend anymore [4]
   @JerineLay At least keep me on MySpace! Who keeps the dog? Please take the damn dog! He loves you more anyhow! #jbd-1 [5]
   @besz You don’t even remember I don’t have a Myspace. The dog was your idea you can keep it, I’m moving out. Had enough of you. #jbd-1 [6]
   All the way to to end of #jbd-1.

   Remember, you can break up easily within 140 characters or less if you are a twitter addict. If you do not break up via twitter, you’ll feel like you’re doing it the wrong way. Breaking up in person is so violent, so uncomfortable, so boring, and ohhhh soooo oldishly web 1.0!

   By the way, Bes & Jerine are not the only celebrities to break up due to twitter. @surrendermyself and @AmandaKay52

are excellently cute examples of twittering because you are twittering to say that you are tweeting about your twittering. And you do it in a very simple fashion, of course.

4. You twitter about everything. All the time.

   You twitter about breathing, taking your first step, looking at the computer, looking at your neighbor, not looking at your neighbor, and lifting your thumbs to twitter. “Just lifted my fingers to tweet something that will be tweeted soon” is a commonly tweeted message by you. You always wonder why your twitter-follower base fluctuates when you head to the restroom.

5. You frown and laugh at people who do not twitter

   Last year, the question “Do you have MySpace?” or “Are you on Facebook?” were very, very common. They are still common today, though they are slowly being overshadowed by the new lines: “Do you Twitter?“, “Are you on twitter?” and similar questions with the word “Twitter” in them.

6. Majority or all of the emails and txts you get are related to twitter.

   You have two folders in your e-mail account. One says “Twitter Inbox.” Other one says “Non-twitter crap.” There is no other folder.

   All of the text messages you get on your cell phone are Twitter-related. When you go through your previous 10,000 text messages, you get annoyed at all the spam texts you have before they are directly from your offline friends and not from twitter.

7. Majority of all snail mail you get is related to twitter.

   You have done it. I will not tell you how, as it is my secret too, but you have managed to integrate Twitter into your offline line through the most traditional and the 2nd oldest form of message transmission: snail mail. Almost all of the actual physical mail you get at your home is twitter-related. You are thinking of getting a postal box just for all the twitter mail.

8. You do things people tell you on Twitter. You do not question any Twitterrer, err, tweet, err, tweeter!

   If someone gives you any advice on Twitter, you take it. If someone says something, that is the same as them being in front of you and saying it. If @verwon tweets you indirectly and vaguely suggests you go get cereal at 2am because of your blabbing and craving for her cereal, you go to the supermarket at 2am to get that cereal!. You simply treat Twitter like it is your wife. Or your husband. Or some holy thing. Or something you do not understand and thus you cannot disobey it. Someone says “I punched you!” on twitter and you actually start crying and start blocking that person. That is why you did not get on Facebook: you knew the pokes would make you not be able to tilt sideways one day.

9. You hate whales.

   In real life, whenever you see a whale on TV or in a Zoo, you get nervous and do not like being talked to for a few moments till you can look at some birds. Unless the birds are right next to the whale, that is. When twitter is down & the big cute whale is being flown by superhuman-strengthened cute little birds, you do not know what to do till the whale disappears. You hate the Fail Whale. The Fail Whale website makes you smile only once before you go into a big monkey rage and start drinking milk and sitting in the corner in order to cool down and think of the stars.

   

   You actually pray that the rope indirectly being pulled by the birds to hold the whale breaks and that you see the whale splatting onto a floor that has this inscription on it: “ERROR THIS, YOU BI$&* OF A WHALE!! GONNA TWEET THIS WITH YOUR SPLATTING PIC TOO!” The whale is your enemy. When people tell you “Hey, have you seen the “I know what you did last summer!” movie?“, you think of google mapping the way back to the secret desert place where you buried that damn whale that has been missing from the zoo for almost a year now.

10. You plan your whole day and life on twitter.

    “Marry Ash”
    “Buy milk at 2 pm”
    “Clean the damn toilet”
    and
    “Clean the blood stains before the kids get home”

    are some of the normal tweets you send to twitter in any hour of your typical day, and you do it publicly so other twitter members can remind you if you relist some agenda in the future. When you get arrested for any crime, the only evidence needed against you is a printout of your twitter timeline.

11. You have a cell phone so that you can tweet through it.

    Phone calls come second. You actually asked the phone company if you can only get a data plan with no minute plan. After they became silent for 2 minutes and said “No…“, you got a minute plan. Literally. You have unlimited data plan and around 27 Twitter apps on your phone. You have a 1 minute nights and weekends minute plan. You are probably with AT&T so your minutes are getting rolled over onto the next month, each month.

12. You check your tweet followers and status updates more than you check your bank balance, your pockets for stuff and your kitchen for food.

    They say “An Apple a day keeps the doctor away.” They were lying because they hated Dracula. “Twitter stats every day keeps Zain’s anxiety away” is what it should say instead. Go on, tweet about it and make sure it is said that way from today onward!

13. You do not ask others for their phone numbers. You ask for their twitter usernames.

    On a first date? If she ain’t got no twitter, she ain’t gonna win your heart. Your coworkers want to email you. You tell them “@BesZain me yo!” They hope for you to get fired right away.

14. You think of becoming the main character in American Psycho 3 whenever you hear the word “BrightKite.”

    You realize that BrightKite is an abomination. You dread BrightKite. They ruined Twitter by adding geographical and other features to the Twitter models. Those copiers. Those evil copiers! Reading this very point makes you upset and want to unsubscribe from my site and from my twitter. * nooooo *

15. You are thinking of blocking me on Twitter because of me bringing up even the slight idea that you can smile in a post related to Twitter, instead of take it seriously a hundred percent.

    Twitter is your life. Why make fun of someone’s life? Me talking about Twitter like this is making you very, very mad.

16. When you cannot twitter, you assign your neighbors and co-workers to twitter for you.

    They actually guess or drive around to find out what you are up to and then twitter for you. A tweeter in need is a friendly tweeting friend indeed. They won’t allow you to take your cell phone with you to the hospital? Into the special screening of a new movie? In the military restroom? In the plane? No problem. What are your friends and contacts for?

17. You tweet so much, any time not spent on twitter means dozens of possible tweets lost.

    You are getting more and more upset since the second you saw the dreaded “BrightKite” mentioned above. Now you are mad at me for making you read this article, and for making you read about things like Facebook. Why are you mad at this very point? Because you could have tweeted at least 35 tweets during this whole time. Instead of reading these 20 points of twitter addiction, you could have shared with the world through your tweets how you breath, how you walk, how you look at stalkers and how you stalker others. Everything you do can be tweeted, and it should be, and it must be!

    You did not lock your doors one night last month because that would have meant not tweeting for a minute. And then you tweeted “Got robbed! ” the next day, after tweeting “Dang, forgot to lock the door and in bed already” on your public twitter line the previous night, where your profile still lists your address for everyone to see.

18. When twitter is down, you want to twitter that twitter is down because you cannot do anything else.

    When you cannot have something, you want it. That is when you realize your reliance on that thing. When twitter is down, you can realize your addiction by actually tweeting about twitter being down while it is down. Alex, @Chuology and @LowEasy_WTF have all done it. So should you!

    

    What if you are getting seizures because Twitter is down and you cannot tweet that it is down? You wanna twitter but a big whale is jumping on you? No problem! The magical magicians at TweetLater allow you to tweet and do many other things on a schedule, so your tweets never get lost and they can be posted when twitter is back up or at a later time. “If only offline addiction to drugs and chocolate could continue on without the actual addictive substance!”, you tweet! Of course, if TweetLater is down also, as it was at the very time of this writing, you may simply have to go see a psychiatrist to get those suicidal thoughts out of your head. Your psychiatrist may suggest tweeting your thoughts to let the emotions out. You may go home tonight and sleep a very confused sleep.

19. Twitter is not an account you use anymore. Twitter is your name.

    You mailed off an application to the government to have your name legally changed to include “Twitter” in it. Till that application gets processed, you want everyone to call you Twitter, or Twit. You feel different being called a “Twit” now compared to before when you had not thought of changing your name. All bullies in your area hate you now because no one is annoyed at their use of the word “Twit” anymore. And also because you threatened to sue them for misusing your almost-legal-until-name-changing-application-gets-approved name.

Are you a twitter addict?

What do you think? Can you think of more points? What is your opinion on any of the above points? How many times did you tweet today before reading this article, or while reading this article?

Are you a twitter addict? And remember to tweet “I will sleep well tonight after reading @BesZ ’s post delight!” from your phone before you go to sleep tonight. It is only 63 letters long.

Thanks for reading. I’m off to tweeting!

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1. Question: What is your usual procedure for addressing offensive or attacking comments? Do you treat all offensive or attacking comments in a similar fashion or do you treat each comment and commentor differently?

   Yeah, sometimes. There have been ones who keep coming back and spewing the same bad attitudes. Sometimes it takes me a while to get tired of them and ban them. I guess it depends on how much they entertain me. However, if they use bad language, too, rather than just being rude or mean, I’m more apt to get tired of them faster. If I remember, I also edit out all bad language, with stars, or asterisks.

2. If, hypothetically, the number of personally attacking comments constitute the majority of the comments you receive, would you consider closing down comments completely as one of your options?

   I may place moderation on comments all the time to avoid any real visitors and subscribers from being spammed with attacks like that or profanity but I don’t think I would be one to completely close down comments or move my site (like I have seen many people do). But again, by the most part, my blog is a personal blog and it’s not a very popular one, so this isn’t something that I think I really have to worry about. Most commentors are civil.

3. You have your own online candle business called Little-Light. In your view, are offending and disagreeing commentors on your blog the same as dissatisfied and unhappy customers? Would you treat both the same, or differently?

   No, I don’t think that they are the same. My customers are paying for a product that they expect to be good quality while my blog readers get my sass for free. I really want to make my customers happy, it is, after all, a business, and while I’d love to have every blog visitor to be happy, that’s just not possible. Even if you only discuss non-confrontational issues, someone somewhere is going to be offended in some way! I try to treat everyone with the same respect that I wish to be treated with, but, granted, that can be kind of hard when you’re constantly shielding the same poisoned arrows coming from the same areas. Plus, the disagreeing commentors are everywhere while I’ve only had one unsatisfied customer since I started with my candles in 2004.

4. You have also had the opportunity of having your own online stalkers who were once your loyal readers and commentors. What happened, and how did you deal with them? Any offline threats?

   The biggest stalker was a 13-year-old girl who, for some strange reason, was completely obsessed with me so she followed me everywhere online and harassed me. She even stole my website designs and went so far as to submit one to the Open Source Web Design (oswd.org) website once.

   However, she was always harmless (thankfully) and the thing that most freaked me out was when she called me on the telephone in late 2005. I just kept blocking her where I could and making known to the world what she was doing to me while doing my best to ignore her directly. It seems juvenile now, of course, to have posted nearly everything she sent me but my postings did save some people from heartache when they would Google an email address or her name, etc. She eventually slowed down trying to contact me and I haven’t heard from her now in probably two years (she’d harassed me for somewhere right around two years). She’s still out there, I see her comments on others’ blogs sometimes, but she’s pretty identifiable and I’ve not seen her around my stuff lately.

   The others were minor, a company’s employee’s wife, for example – just commenting on many posts in an attacking manner. I blocked her IP and haven’t heard from her since. The others are very similar.

5. What is your view about banning readers, commentors, confirmed stalkers or deleting comments?

   I pretty much feel that if you have a website, it’s your website and you can do whatever you want as long as it’s not illegal. People who continually come to harass the author or other commentors (have had that, too) just are simply not welcome. I like healthy discussion and debate but there is no room for slander. If someone is just being nasty, they bring everyone else down. If a website’s owner feels uncomfortable with someone’s presence, then there’s no reason they should feel guilty about banning that person or deleting their comments, etc. Not to mention there may be other reasons for deleting comments or banning someone besides stalker-like behavior.

6. Have you ever closed down comments completely on any post, or deleted comments from some posts?

   The only time I have ever close down comments completely was when I had a spam problem. This has been a couple of years ago and for some reason some certain posts were getting spam trackbacks and pingbacks that were getting by my protection so I closed comments on about five posts that were just day-to-day posts. (Of course, since then my spam problem has been taken care of.) There was a time when I approved all comments whether nice or not as long as they weren’t spam and would either ignore or respond to them accordingly. However, my view of that has changed in the last year and on controversial posts I may state after a while that I welcome healthy discussion but if you just come to attack me or other commentors or are full of profanity your comment may be subject to editing or deletion.

   The most I have ever edited on comments would be URLs that were long and broke my site’s layout at the time (or just plain looked bad), removed URLs that were spam from otherwise valid comments, and starred out profanity. I decided that it is my site and no one but me has the right of free speech on it. I don’t need my family or friends stumbling on that type of language and thinking I condone it (one of the two regular family visitors is a 12-year-old as well). Some of the more harmless words I will let by, but the “f-word” absolutely is not allowed on my site or other sexually explicit words. I have also edited out the personal addresses that people have posted before, both email and also a household address that people have posted of someone they believed to be an identity thief (but this person is most likely a victim himself).

   I also went through at one time and deleted a lot of comments from the Geek Squad and DHL posts that were just contributing nothing to the conversation. Deletion, however is not a common practice for me.

7. Some people may say that rudely responding back to people who attack you can be a bit harsh, while others may say that doing so is the only way to keep personal attackers under check and at bay. What is your view on that?

   Why would it be harsh to respond to someone who attacks me? It’s all in the manner /in which/ I respond. Harsh or not, I have that prerogative. As far as keeping personal attackers under check – that’s just not possible. As I mentioned before, no matter what you say or do, you will offend or tick of someone somewhere. They may respond, they may not. There’s no way to control what other people think, say, or do. The only thing you can do, if you are offended at people who attack you, is to delete their comments and not let it get to you.

8. Is there anything related to comments or commenting that you wish you would not have done? Would you be willing to keep something you already have? If you had a chance to go back and change anything on your site, like restarting from scratch, what would you do differently than what you have done?

   No, I don’t think so. In retrospect, it’s just a blog and a really small part of my life. I don’t think there’s anything that was/is big enough for me to say I would change.

9. When the first part of this interview was published, it was in March of 2008, almost a year ago. Since then, there have been many new developments in your online and offline life, and also in the blogging world. Do you have any new or changed ideas or policies regarding comments for this year, or are they still the same as before?

   Nope, I don’t think so, I think it’s all the same.

10. You now have a new welcome site for your new baby who is on the way! That will make you not only a Mom blogger but also a new-mom blogger too! Do you have any advice on other parent bloggers on how they can shuffle between their offline responsibilities and dealing with all people [good and bad] in the online world?

    I would just say do what you’re comfortable with. If you don’t want to deal with the bad, just delete it and move on. No reason those things should affect your “real” (offline) life, you and your family is ore important. As far as the good, just treat others as you want to be treated. Visit the sites of those that visited you, even if it takes you a couple of weeks to do it. But, really, the offline stuff comes first. Family first, then have some fun on the internet if you want!

• Valerie, thank you so much for your time and for being patient! This interview has taken more than a year to start and finish due to my other activities and appointments, and I really appreciate you taking the time to answer all of my questions and for allowing me to keep on bugging you about this interview and to actually interview you. Thank you also for taking the time during your pregnancy to talk to me and to help me finish this interview.

From blog readers to business customers, Valerie from Spoken-For.org deals with commentors, readers and visitors of many different kinds online

Combined with Part 1 of this interview, many bloggers, commentors, readers and other online people can find out and learn of the different trends and ways of how commentors views online bloggers, and what kind of options are available to bloggers. Valerie has to manage and has been dealing with comments from regular visitors, supporters, inquirers, spammers, attackers, and many other kinds of online readers for many years now. One of the most important things in this interview indirectly revolves around the concept of a reader having some indirect obligations towards the blogs and bloggers they encounter, a point which is greatly ignored or missed by many online people.

That is the end of the interview. I hope you all find it interesting and can offer your input, comments, questions or anything else that you wish. A final closing post regarding the entire interview will be posted soon, hopefully within a week. In that post, I will summarize and outline many points related to comments, commenting, comment replies and related things that can help you on your online adventures as a commentor, a blogger, both, or something else.

Thank you, again, Valerie, for taking the time to answer these questions.

Thank you for reading, and if you have any questions, comments, or any thoughts about this interview or anything related to it, please go ahead and post in the comments below.

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Posting the same thing on multiple networks separately and individually

While RSS so far mainly allows the same content to be synced and displayed on multiple devices and through multiple mediums, services like Ping.fm allow you to post the same content on multiple networks. Thus, my message "I’m so hungry I must post this post!" can be posted to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, BrightKite, Rejaw, Plurk, Kwippy, and many other networks at the same time. Same is the case with pictures: I can post my million dollar artistic talent art on Twitter, Flickr, and more places. The very "Quick Thoughts" section of this website that you are reading, TheReasoner.com, is a duplicate copy of all of the content I post on Twitter. I do that for two reasons: I will have more control over the content for future use, and I will have a backup of the content on one single area, my site, that I can hopefully manage in an easier form along with the remaining content on my website.

Is it online waste, or is it something else?

I microblogged, if that’s the funny new standard word for expressing my thoughts in a briefly brief manner, about this idea of online excess waste on multiple services online at the same time, thanks to Ping.fm. Someone on Bright Kite responded to my labeling of this idea as an online excess waste and said that the duplication, or waste, was actually "the current history book of mankind." That is another perception of the situation, and it is also accurate in my view.

Everything I am leaving behind online can act like a history book for now, before and later. If I post "Wow!" on 3 different social networking sites at the same time, not only do those 3 areas become a historical record of me feeling or expressing or writing "Wow!", but hey also become a record and a historical account of me saying that on 3 different sites. The message, and the entire action of posting that message on 3 different sites, becomes the historical accounts in their own perspectives and in combination too probably.

I am also, however, creating a duplicate paper trail for myself. I have the same exact text in more places. I have the same exact pictures in more than one place. If I blog or if I am online for money, having more exposure in such a fashion can be extremely good for me. However, I am not online solely for money, so such a trait makes me wonder if it is a habit that needs more observation. Or maybe it is a habit that needs less restraints?

What do you think? Does multiple microblogging services mean more online waste?

So, in your view, does the act of using multiple social networking and microblogging sites create more online waste, or does it create more online venues to get you or your work more exposure? Do you consider both to be happening at the same time? Do you think you should do something about it? What do you think: Online waste, online socialization, both, or something else? Is it worth the duplicate content and any possible excess waste, if there is such a thing happening, in order to get the message to more people and in order to meet more people?

As for me, yes, I think that me participating in multiple social networks is not only giving me more experience and exposure to new and different people and trends, but it is also creating more online waste for me.

Thank you for reading.

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There are many ways to answer such a question. One way is to try to look at the reason of why you are online. Are you online to:

1. make (more) money?
2. check your e-mails?
3. be more satisfied because you thought being online can or would be interesting?
4. find something related to school/university, work, or something else
5. talk to someone, to tell someone something, to find out more about them or to tell them more about you
6. see how the supposed wisdom and knowledge of the author of these words can help improve your life and thinking, or confuse your more?

Another way to answer this question is by the actual outcome of mood you are seeking due to your online activity. Are you online in order to:

1. distract yourself from something in the offline world?
2. be even more happier?
3. be sadder?
4. be confused?
5. be more confused and happy?

Why are you online at this very moment?

So, why are you online at this very moment? I am online mainly because I am waiting to talk to someone. I am also online to check e-mails, send out some important messages, be even more happier and confused, do some things offline and the computer is nearby, write something offline, write this question on the computer, among many other things online and offline. I am also online because I am hungry.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or answers. Thank you for reading this. I really appreciate it.

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Facebook is considered by many people to be a more mature online social networking service compared to MySpace . Facebook focuses more on the concept of networks: you belong to an area, a school, a company or some other group on Facebook which becomes your primary network. As of this writing, Facebook does not allow you to directly edit the entire layout of your profile, which is considered a blessing and a downside, depending on which group of people you talk to. You can, however, customize where different parts and snippets of information get placed on your layout.

MySpace is considered by many to be the most widely known online social networking service in the world. MySpace focuses more on the concept of adding friends and other people to your profile so that you can get to know them more. MySpace allows you to edit almost the entire layout of your MySpace profile. Again, just like Facebook, this is considered both a good and a bad thing, based on the preferences of different people. Maybe having different preferences is what life is all about, right?

A Facebook account, at the moment, focuses heavily on comments and other ways of interaction to help people communicate. A MySpace account, at the moment, focuses heavily on comments, direct messages, and the actual profile customization to help people communicate. MySpace also has its own instant messaging service, called the MySpace IM that you download onto your computer to chat with all of your MySpace buddies or strangers. Facebook, in contrast, has developed its own in-browser chat service, enabling you to chat with any of your online contacts within your browser, while you are actively browsing or doing anything on your Facebook account.

Do you prefer Facebook or MySpace?

So, back to our original question: based on the above brief information, would you prefer using Facebook or MySpace? Are there some other points or reasons for your answer?

I will stop here so that I can do a few things, including checking a message I got on MySpace and sending a message to someone on Facebook. Thank you for reading.

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