Two years ago I started college and my facebook profile. Facebook was awesome, it was the community for colleges and college students. It created a base for connecting with other students on campus with similar interests or for getting in contact with others in your classes. For me it was a way to keep track of people I met in class and to also find out what I missed if I was absent in class. Profiles were simple and to the point: interests, contact info, pictures, classes. Information was as accessible as possible and connecting with others couldn't have been any easier than Facebook made it.

Where did facebook go wrong? Everyone knows what happened. They opened membership up to EVERYONE. No longer is a valid college e-mail required to join, Facebook is now an open, global community like MySpace. Many were opposed to this change by the Facebook staff and created groups and demonstrations against it. I saw no harm in opening it up to the public. Facebook was so much better than MySpace. MySpace is riddled with dupe accounts, bots, spammers, and terrible looking profiles that make anyone with any sense of web design cringe. Ever try to use MySpace classifieds? I agree, its a piece of shit. No matter what category I look in its flooded with tons of porn advertisements from the army of porn bots that reside in the MySpace databases.

It couldn't be that bad could it? Facebook does you a favor by keeping you conform to a strict profile. Maintaining this form is what Facebook represents, the quick retrieval of useful information about the person in question. By letting the world into the realm of Facebook they were doing everyone who was tired of the MySpace mayhem a favor. No more profiles full of music, glitter backgrounds, gifs piled onto gifs, and tens of youtube videos playing at once. Now that everyone had jumped onto Facebook (many transfers from MySpace, no doubt), the Facebook team had to feel pressured to introduce more features that appealed to the ex-MySpace users. More segments were added to the Facebook profile. Now add-ons exist to show your favorite games, interactive add-ons such as the zombie add-on, and a gift giving system.

Okay, profiles are starting to become garbled with information that is irrelevant to me as a college user. I still just want my basic contact information and class information. I don't like wading through the extra "features" Facebook ingeniously added to its interface. Profiles are still uniform at the very least and I can still find the information I need to find a lot quicker than I could ever find on MySpace.With all of those small things happening I let it slide.

Last week I started getting friend requests from people I didn't know. So what do I do? I check out their profile of course! Am I in class with this person? A fellow podcaster? Who could this be? A camwhore bot. Fantastic! I never thought I would see the day. When I think of MySpace I think of logging into my account, greeted with the daily heap of spam friend requests and messages. Its more of a chore than anything, and by the time I get done cleaning them up I forgot what I wanted to do on MySpace.

Facebook just became another chore on the social site list. As such I will no longer use the site as much as I did in the past since I don't want to go through and clear all of my spam before getting to the information I want. I can only hope that Facebook steps up their efforts to curb spam within the Facebook community or it may turn into nothing more than a second MySpace.