Recently I’ve been fascinated by how Facebook has been owning MySpace in every way. It used to be a pretty tight race, but now I’m pretty sure the people that run MySpace have given up on life. You can say what you want about Facebook, but at the end of the day they are making changes and improvements, and no matter what you say I know you are checking it constantly. MySpace is the same as it was five years ago. Facebook is green fields and fresh meadows. MySpace is a desolate wasteland covered in scum.

You might not agree with me, and that’s fine. But the one thing you can’t deny is that a large percentage of MySpace profiles don’t belong to real people. Like… a really large percentage. I’m not a huge user, and my profile is pretty bare-bones, but I still get about a friend request every two days or so. I can’t remember the last time one of them was legit.

At first they were all the same, back in the primitive early days of the webcam girl profile. Gorgeous girls in skimpy clothes with stripper names like “CrYStal<3″. A few pictures to get you enticed, and usually a flirty paragraph that helped you “get to know” the girl. Then once you were roped in, you stumbled onto the link to “see the webcam.” I would get these every once in a while.

Not anymore. That is the old way of doing things. The mom and pop way. We live in a Wal-Mart world. Quantity over quality, mass marketing. Now the webcam girls are all I ever see on MySpace… but these aren’t you grandpa’s webcam girls. The profiles have been stripped down to the essentials. They get right down to business. No pictures, no flirty paragraph, just a sentence and a link. “MySpace made me take my pictures down. See them HERE.” And the Crystal<3 we came to know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Her and her hot friends have been replaced by Average Jane’s. When you see these friend requests, you’re duped into thinking that it’s a real person because there’s no cleavage and no whale-tail.

Today I got such a friend request… and I was completely blown away. I was SURE it wasn’t going to be a webcam girl because the girl in the picture was, well, ugly. She was huge and pimply and greasy and her name was Hulda. I swear to God. Yet her profile looked just like so many I had seen before. Sorry, Hulda, but I don’t want to see any pictures of you here or anywhere. How is that good marketing?

This got me thinking, though, that they must be stealing profile pictures and screen names from unsuspecting MySpace users en mass and copying them over to a skeleton profile. Pretty clever. But then THAT got me thinking… what if, somewhere, somehow, I have my own webcam guy profile??? And THAT got me thinking, “On second thought, that is pretty good marketing.”