What with Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the teen-friendly social networking site MySpace and grown-ups writing serious articles about it, it can only be a matter of time before someone declares it, like, so over. Until that happens, today's Washington Post reports that schools in and around the US capital are warning pupils to be careful what they write because prospective employers or college admissions tutors could be reading.
As the piece points out, MySpace and similar sites such as Facebook are a radical departure from the locked diaries kept by previous generations of teens - while the information is still personal and sometimes confessional, what was once private is now out in the open. Some students have been expelled for posing in front of kegs of beer or writing up their drinking binges.
MySpace is a staggering success. Since launching in 2003, it has become the fourth most visited domain on the internet and registered 35 million users. In another one of those pieces newspapers love to write about it, USA Today reported it "seems like every teen and twentysomething in the USA is there." In a fantastic piece of teen-speak (three uses of the word "like" in one sentence) one member suggested it was supplanting the telephone.
MySpace has gotten to the point where instead of "What is your phone number?" it's like "What is your MySpace profile?" ... Like every single person has one. It's like "Oh, what's your MySpace page?"
