photo by Paul J Whaley via Flickr

To think, I had somewhat gotten over my insane hatred of MySpace. Well, that is over. Look, I understand that MySpace is "cool" and it's "social networking" and, no offense to my girl danah boyd, but yes, it's a relatively safe place for kids to have their own, well, space. I get that the design is somewhat intentionally ghetto. But my current frustration goes beyond web design snobbery.

Answer me this simple question: how can a site that's all about social networking and communication make it impossible to send messages to people?????

GOOODAAMMIT I HATE MYSPACE SO MUCH RIGHT NOW!@#!@#!@#

I cannot find a simple way to COMPOSE an email message within the system. Sure, I can look at someone's profile and "send a message," but how do I find their profile?! especially if they have a common name, like John.

Oh my god, I can't even explain how asinine the system is, it's gotten me so upset. To all those people who say MySpace is superior to good old email, you can suck my postage stamps!

Let me try again from the beginning.

I want to send a message to a MySpace friend of mine. How do I do this?

Here's what I tried.

I went to the "Mail" tab, which showed me my inbox.

I looked for an option to "create" or "compose" or "send" a message. I clearly ask too much of a messaging system. There is no such option.

I click on something promising called "Address Book." I think, "this must be where all my happy socially-networked MySpace friends are!" I am wrong. According to MySpace, my address book is empty. I have 417 MySpace friends, but my address book shows zero. Please explain to me how this is "cool" or "hip" or "Web 2.0" or "indie." It's neither of those things. It's pure crapola.

So then I think, "well, I've sent this person a message recently. I'll just check my 'sent' folder till I find that, click on the profile and send a message that way." Wrong. According to the rotten placentas at MySpace, "Sent mail is automatically deleted after it is 14 days old." Wha??? Why would they do that? There is no good reason for this. This is not cool. This is dumb, and don't tell me it's about saving space on their hard drives. We're talking about simple text-based messages. Meanwhile the company is hosting, probably MILLIONS of hours of audio and video files.

I go back to the Home page and look for other possibilities. There's a section that's all about my friends. I choose "Edit Friends." This takes me to a page showing my first 20 of 417 friends. There is no apparent order to the listing (though I've been told they're ordered by their sign-up date with MySpace). There's no way to sort by name or even search. So I'm supposed to manually flip through my friend list, 20 at a time, for all 417??? So, the more friends I have, the HARDER it is to communicate with them??

It's way too late for this bullshit. I swear, all these statistics about how much time people spend in MySpace is not a positive thing. It's an indictment against the whole structure of the service. I mean, people spend MAD time in line at the DMV. That doesn't mean the DMV is the hot new place to kick it. That means they suck at what they do.

My short term love affair with MySpace is over.

I want them to die a horrible death. Now.