What on earth are we doing on MySpace.

This is a site that’s been demonized by so many pastors, ridiculed by so many web designers and feared by so many parents. It is, quite simply, the bane of a PC repairman’s existence, as kids love to “pimp” their MySpace pages with lots of Flash, cruising MySpace “layout” websites loaded with spam and every other thing. If you’re a regular MySpace user, I strongly urge you to empty your Internet Explorer Temporary Internet Files and cookies every day (version 7 allows you to set it to do that automatically in TOOLS—INTERNET OPTIONS—ADVANCED—SECURITY) *and* empty your PC’s TEMP file *every day* (re-start in safe mode [hold down F5 at startup], then START—RUN—%temp%). These are two places that get bogged down by MySpace crap. Also, keep your Temporary Internet Files folder as small as possible (recommended: 250MB). The bigger this file, the more junk you collect, the slower your PC runs.

So, if MySpace is so bad, why are we there? Well, we’ve never promoted the PraiseNet. Never. The thousands of people who come here each month arrive, pretty much, by accident. By word of mouth or by Google or something. We’ve never bought an ad, never run a commercial, never paid off anybody to point to us. But, we feel that, after five and a half years of shakedown, we’re ready for prime time. So we plan to establish a presence on MySpace and FaceBook and, possibly, Black Planet as well: social networking sites where millions of folks gather.

What we’re discovering is MySpace, like most anything else, I suppose, is what you make it. I’ve seen terrible things—really bad language and worse manners—and lots of profiles of very young women and girls using bad language and worse judgment, exposing themselves salaciously in demeaning ways they will surely regret when their common sense kicks in around 30.

But there’s an enormous Christian community there as well, which is worth looking for and cultivating. So far, the experience has been amazing. MySpace code is a convoluted mess. It is some of the worst web design I’ve ever seen, a bit chocking from a multi-billion-dollar enterprise like MySpace. The pimp stuff makes it even worse, sheesh, as everybody out there seems to think having things spin and blink = good web design.

What I am discovering, however, is *everybody* is there. People I’d lost contact with *decades* ago are there. It’s amazing, like I’m Rip Van Priest, awake from his nap, discovering something most of you have discovered years ago. I could, literally, stay up all night following strings of friends from one page to another and never find the end of MySpace. It just goes on and on. It’s actually a bit intimidating, and now my concern is less about the PraiseNet being under-used but of the PraiseNet crashing from MySpace traffic. But, in God’s service, that’s a good problem to have.

If you haven’t already seen it, the PraiseNet’s MySpace page is here. By all means, run up there and become our friend or whatever happens on MySpace. And to all of the MySpace folk visiting us for the first time—welcome. Sorry we don’t have more things blinking around here, but I’ll see what we can do.