Mass movement to dump MySpace

photo illustration by brad vest the daily illini Photo Illustration by Brad Vest

Rupert Murdoch, MySpace owner, might cry himself to sleep tonight. He may witness the mass exodus of thousands of friends on his social network, the result of "International Delete Your MySpace Account Day."

The movement, conceived by "Bloggasm" author Simon Owens, has been gaining momentum on the Web since its dawn on Jan. 20. The blogger vented about MySpace, including intrusive banner ads, spam and technological glitches, hoping to encourage other frustrated users to join him in abandoning their accounts.

Another common complaint is screen-clogging pop-ups.

"Oh my gosh! They are so annoying," said Maura Urquiza, MySpace user and freshman in FAA.

"I'm against people trying to game social networks to market something. This has been quite common with MySpace - nude webcam girls, products, movies - advertising campaigns create fake profiles and friend you," Owens said in an e-mail.

The blog post featured a top 10 list of reasons your account may be in need of deletion.

Other media sights soon picked up on Owens' appeal. "Bloggasm's" comments rapidly expanded; in addition, hundreds of bloggers linked their pages to his post.

"News about the day has been spread far and wide - it made it onto the front pages of Digg and Fark and was even linked to on MSNBC's Web site," Owens said.

Notices have spread across the social networking world. The Facebook event, "International Delete Your MySpace Account Day," has nearly 1,500 confirmed guests, planning to drop the rival social network.

The popularity of the idea was enough to garner an official statement by a MySpace spokeswoman on BBC.

"This Delete-Your-MySpace day is just about being controversial," Rebekah Horne said in the official statement. Horne is the vice president of Fox Interactive Media and MySpace in Australia and New Zealand. "MySpace is still the biggest social networking site in the world."

For some, the immense and varied audience is exactly what is unappealing about the site.

"I think MySpace attracts so many people that you get really old people and really young people which means more strangers and crazy people," said Katie Motil. The senior in LAS only networks on Facebook.

Owens said he has received a lot of negative feedback online. The blog, "Mashable," questioned Owens' intentions.

In the post, "Is the Blogosphere being gamed?" "Mashable" accused "Bloggasm" of targeting MySpace in order to capitalize major media attention.

"A lot of people have created a straw-man argument against me saying that I'm anti-commercialization or anti-advertisement. This is not the case at all," Owens said. "I realize that for Web sites to offer us great services for free, they need a way of bringing in revenue."

Monitors of the controversy will have to wait until an official number of dropped accounts rolls in to see how much headway the movement made against intrusive scams.

For now, a warning on the Facebook event invitation reads:

"Dear Myspace - Because you claim over 200 million accounts and don't report on actual active users like Facebook (60 million), we are grouping together to delete all our empty, dead, double, and never-been-used profiles on your ad filled site so that your true numbers can shine. Don't get too excited when you see a big spike in log-ins on January 30th, it is just so we can delete our dead accounts. Cheers!"