This week-end, I went ahead and set up a MySpace page, as much as anything because I believe one of my duties will be setting up a MySpace page for the presidential contender I'll be working for through a consulting company (Hopefully, I will be able to announce the name of the candidate in the next day or two).

The whole thing has been a real learning experience for a number of reasons.

#1) As EM said in the comments over there,

"Hey John! Welcome to MySpace. Its like the blogosphere only kind of pointless..."

To tell you the truth, I don't even think there's much of a point to presidential contenders doing MySpace other than being able to say, "I have more friends than you on Myspace; therefore, that's an indication of my strength!"

#2) There's rampant identity theft happening on MySpace. You have Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Malkin, Thomas Sowell, Irshad Manji and a gazillion other "celebrities" of some sort or another on MySpace, many of whom have thousands of friends. Which ones are fake and which ones are real? Are any of them real? I'm leaning towards "no."

That being said, mixed martial arts fighter Dan Henderson (whom I've seen fight on Pride) added me on as a friend and I think it might be the real guy because I think he commented on RWN once -- ehr, I think it was him anyway. Who really knows with this stuff?

#3) A lot of people have added unique little tweaks and designs to their MySpace page and they're almost uniformly hideous, 5 years out of date, and look like they're set up for people with minimum size, 1280x720 screen resolutions. That's not a rip on anybody in particular, it just seems to be how the individualized MySpace templates that are out there are set up.

#4) Currently, my rule of thumb is to accept just about anybody as a "friend" who doesn't have an obscenity in their name. However, as far as sending friend requests goes, I'm not sure exactly what the etiquette is over there or if there is any. For example, is it cool to send out a friend request based on nothing more than the fact that you run across an attractive woman's pic who's a "friend" of the fake Rush Limbaugh, which probably means she's conservative? I have no idea.

#5) Some people have their profiles set to private, but after they add you as a friend, you can see the whole page. Usually in those cases, after I've been added, it turns out that the things that were hidden turned out to be kind of run-of-the-mill. So, why were they hidden in the first place? Is there some massive security issue I don't know about? I doubt it, they're probably just being a bit shy, but still, you never know.

#6) Someone asked me if MySpace was part of some kind of plan to bring more traffic over to RWN and CG. Honestly, it isn't. If I could figure out how to do that with MySpace, I would, but I haven't got a clue at this point.