Reconnecting with Old Friends

I found something else that My Space is good for other than porn spam and error messages from Tom.


I know I do complain about My Space a lot. Let’s face it, their system sucks. The site is always having some problem or another. The fact that they allow HTML in the profiles means morons can have dancing hamsters and videos and glitter and music and slideshows and all at the same time. Then, when you come across one of these profiles, you sit forever waiting as it locks up your PC. Not to mention the those who place dark text on a dark background so you can’t even read their pages.

Then there are those annoying spam posts saying, “Please forward this to 100 friends or you will be attacked by wild, HIV infected squirrels, have ten years of bad luck and never get married.” And don’t forget the phony friend requests from horny guys (if you’re a girl) or porn sites (if you’re a guy).

In the end though there is one benefit that comes thru. That is the ability to find old friends you may have lost touch with. Friendster promised this, as did Classmates.com. Neither really delivered. There’s no argument from me that My Space at least delivers in that area. That and yes I will admit to finding a boatload of cool bands.

Anyway, recently I had one such reconnection with a guy named Gregg (aka Kafka) that I had completely lost touch with. We met thru a mutual friend in what seems like a hundred years in the past. At one point about ten years ago Gregg, my girlfriend at the time Kim and I lived together in a basement apartment in Fairview, NJ for a few months. About two and a half years ago I was at his wedding.

In between those times we grew close and discovered a shared interest in philosophy, poetry, music and various obscene perversions that made for great breakfast table conversation (there was a monkey involved and he could play the flute … that’s all I’ll say). Sadly however, since then we grew apart. I lost his number and the only email I had was being bounced back to me.

When I first got on My Space, I almost immediately reconnected with my ex-girlfriend Kim. This made me think that Gregg could be on there somewhere. So I would, from time to time, search for him. That is of course when the search function was working. Bit of a side note; I contacted My Space to tell them that their search function was down on several occasions. Each time I received an email telling me how to find the search link, click it, fill out the little form and hit submit. Yeah … um … thanks guys.

On June 15 I was happy to read a message from Gregg in my My Space inbox titled ‘Some shithead you use to know’. We met for a few beers shortly after and tried to catch up. I told him that, while I was in North Carolina for W.E. Fest, I was talking to Jim Testa of Jersey Beat about this ongoing joke Gregg and I had. In a nutshell, it started with a bunch of us on a train going somewhere in NYC. There was a poster with a picture of Franz Kafka that Gregg was standing near. We all joked about how much they looked alike and started telling stories that began, “I saw Kafka on the subway…”

Eventually it grew to the point of becoming a party game of sorts. We’d go around—mostly just among our small group of friends but at times involving strangers—telling folks to finish the sentence, “I saw Kafka on the subway…” As I was telling this to Mr. Testa on the porch of our beach house, he was inspired to write a song. More than anything, I wanted to tell Gregg.

This brings us back to June 15 when Gregg contacted me. He had just opened the account when Kim sent him a message. All it said was, “I saw Kafka on the subway and he was eating a ham sandwich.” He found me on her space and … well you know the story. So My Space done good … now if we can find a way to make it—or something like it—work better, more consistently, we’d be set.

I’m all for online communities if the systems behind them are solid. And My Space, despite its popularity, leaves a lot to be desired. Even while writing this, I would go on to find some information and get that annoying error page. You know the one, “Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred. This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group.” Come on Tom, start spending some of that Fox money, would ya?!


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