Saturday, December 6, 2008

I am Nicole's strained patience.

What's this, you must be a friend to send a message. Okay, so I have to google this in order to find out what it means. But I can't google the exact phrase, because it contains a person's name, which will be too specific. So I have to rephrase this message and fill in various pronouns and alternative phrasings until google gives me the result.

"You must be their friend to send them a message." Nope, no useful results there. "You must be this person's friend to send them a message." ... AND myspace. Okay, that gets it.

Okay, finally, someone on google has a clue what this message means and where it comes from. Spam filter. Does the message say anything about spam filtering? No it does not. Just cold, blunt, sucks-to-be-you, die worthless scum, go starve in the desert, whatever. It doesn't say that this person is trying to block spam. No, when you get this message, it feels like this person is deliberately, intentionally blocking you personally. And when you're already fighting a battle against the internet, and hackers, and paranoia, and interfered-with communications, it doesn't help to receive a message like this on top of everything else.

So I sent a friend request.

What next, myspace? You must be a friend to send this person a friend request?

When you block spam, you should at least have the error message inform the person that somebody is trying to block spam, and not you personally. Something like 'This is intended to prevent spam,' at the very least.

In addition to that, a moving box appeared and slid across the page with an advertisement on it. It wasn't a pop-up window, so it could not be blocked. It was just a mysterious, sneaky, annoying thing. When I see obnoxious advertisements appearing on a website, and they weren't there before, and we're in the middle of an economic collapse, then it makes me ask questions about whether myspace might be having 'liquidity problems' and is hiring obnoxious, annoying new advertisers as a desperate last resort.

Is myspace going down?

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