I sincerely apologize for disturbing you.

This is meant to be a short general comment to anyone who feels puzzled about my sending them a friend request and then wishes to send me a note to find out why. I’m truly sorry, if the request itself offends or disturbs you in any way, but my intent to have someone as a new MySpace friend is as innocently pure as it can get.

Please check you’re security settings on your profile before asking me anything that needs a reply. The following really irritating issue prompted this blog entry.

I’ve tried my best to reply to an email message today from a person whom I’ll not identify, but found that I couldn’t due to their profile settings.

I’d hope to think even Tom would get a little peeved to get a note that he could not reply to. And, from my point of view, it’s not very social at all.

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The subject of the note to me was:

So tell me….

—————– Original Message —————–

From:

Date: Dec 26, 2007 7:02 PM

What’s your reason for contacting me? I browsed your profile, but I don’t like adding friends without a little discussion.

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My attempted reply:

Hi,

Sorry about not answering your note right away and Sorry that I didn’t send you a note with the friend request. I did look at your profile, but I didn’t think that you’d mind having another very tame MySpace friend. I didn’t mean to seem like a spammer, but we have a few Mutual MySpace friends I thought a friend request may be OK with you.

If I have disturbed you in any way, I’m sincerely sorry, and will not bother you again. Yes. It’s true. I’m very big on the Las Vegas culture. Yes. I like to blog about Las Vegas and it’s culture. Yes. I like the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend. Yes. I think Betty Page types are sexy. Yes. I have lived on Oahu, and my brother and sister were born there. Yes. I’m flawed, attracted to beautiful women, and prefer to think of my self as a gentleman. And, I’m very very sorry that I didn’t send you a note to explain the friend request.

I would love just being a MySpace friend, and I’m just hoping that you may like looking at my blogs and leaving a comment when you feel it’s necessary. You may get a happy birthday or happy new year, but I never spam and do my best not to disturb any of the MySpace friends I have. I hope this note gives you a little more clarity as to my reason for contacting you.

Sincerely. Mark

My thoughts and info about the MySpace deletion.

First of all I wish to apologize, if I have offended anyone in my pursuit of finding good friends or for anything offensive here in my rant.

As with my original view of Vegas, I was not really interested in joining MySpace until I wanted to prove to someone a point.  I feel that Social Networking is the best way of finding very good friends, if done right.  For me, the best way of doing this type of networking was just to attend the local fun events that I really liked and just plain socialize.  Although doing this takes some amount of effort, I feel that the results obtained are usually the best.  In my opinion, about the worst way of trying to find a good friend is going into a chat room, conversing for half an hour or so, then giving out your cell phone, only to find that the person that now has your number has no honorable intent.

So in order to point out that MySpace was about the best means to do some social networking on the internet today, I joined.  When I had completed my profile with as honestly as possible,  I conducted a little test.  I performed a browse search for all women, five miles where I live here in Vegas, wanting to date, single or divorced, 25 to 50, straight, and Caucasian.  With only those criteria, my search turned up over 1700 profiles of ladies wishing to date.  This confirmed my point to this chatroom person which was that MySpace was a very good place to be, if you’re intent was to find someone who just wanted to date.

So what was my true focus then?  Simply speaking, I drive a cab in Vegas, and the more useful information I can give a customer or the better service I can provide, the better my tips.  So, my main focus was to gather friends in Vegas that shared my same interests and/or may be helpful to my taxicab customers.  If you look at my main interests, you can see that I like cooking and history as well.  My interests were listed in the order of importance, so that I didn’t confuse anyone about what my intentions were in MySpace.  Although, I’m working hard at selling product on the web and in great need of a lady friend, I’ve made no obvious effort to do any sort of soliciting in MySpace.

So, since the focus of my add campaign was to gain friends, who could help me with supplying good helpful information to other fiends, and I started sending out add requests.  This I did for a couple days, and then went to look to see if any of the requests had been denied.  After looking thoroughly on MySpace, I could not find any means to track my add request and, sent a note off to MySpace to see if I had overlooked something , and suggested that this might be worth improving on.  I believe I said in this note, “Persistence can sometimes be a good thing, but at other times it’s just plain annoying.”  Unfortunately, this note was never replied to.

I was writing blogs on the events I’d experienced during the weeks, and would list the events I thought would be most enjoyable on a given weekend.  I did get to the point where I had about 100 friends, and started to look at the friends of these friends to see if they shared similar interests.  Well this continued for about another week, meanwhile I am sending out very benign “Thank you for the add” comments, thinking that I was very much within the MySpace Terms of Use policy.

Now on early Thursday morning, I sent out a few thank you comments, and then start to look for some more new friends.  I send maybe three requests, when to my surprise, I could no long send a request.  I tried logging out and back in, that is when I found that I had been deleted.  I immediately send a note to customer service to find out what was going on, but after waiting for 30 minutes and no reply, I thought I would try to re-register.   Sure enough I could, but every thing was gone. 

So I began reconstruction.  I put in my photo, and was doing a couple of saves on the “About me” section, when I again found that I had been deleted. So I sent a note off again, this time I pointed out that I had tried to follow the terms of use as well as could be expected, and fervently apologized for any violation of the terms or if my intent had been misconstrued.  I could see how someone perceive that I was slightly over zealous with the add request and be mistaken as being a spammer.  I had gained 400 friends by Wednesday morning.

While I was taking a little break from driving about 7am that morning (when I usually get the local paper from my driveway and have a little breakfast), I was surpised to find that I had just received an add request, but there was still no mail from customer service.  Upon checking my login, I could see that I was back, but with the new incomplete profile and no friends, but for Tom.  By the time I went back to work there had still been no word from customer service, and it was only after I returned home at the end of the day that I found a note from MySpace with no explanation as to why, telling me that I should now be able to log in.

After thinking about this for a little while, I’ve decided to approach things in a much more cautious manner, and send an email first to those profiles that I feel may possibly perceive me as being a spammer, and to let them know that if they wish to block me, it’s perfectly fine with me.  I want to be as benign as possible from now on and hopefully avoid being deleted again.  I’ve also copied off my profile, so that I could have it saved and so that any more issues like this could be less painful to come up with the information again. 

All I can say now is “shame on MySpace” for the sudden deletion with no clear reason.  I only hope it will never happen again, for there are always other places to go on the internet, like facebook.  Honestly, I’ve grown over the past few weeks to be a big advocate for what MySpace was about and what it offered to it’s member, but I’m sorry, I don’t think that I will be get over this disappointing experience any time soon.

Have fun and be safe. Mark