MySpace Friend Adder Is Just Depressing

I love social networking. I think there's a lot of promise in tools that allow people to connect with one another across large distances, connect with colleagues and professionals, or even organize like-minded people for a common cause. But for all of the promise social networking sites and services offer, there are still people who use them for nothing more than marketing a brand or making themselves feel popular. That's where MySpace Friend Adder comes in. If your MySpace profile is a little lonely and you want to make more friends, just give the service your information; in return, it promises thousands of new MySpace friends.





There are two major target audiences for a service like the MySpace Friend Adder: marketing professionals who have a brand or product to promote and who have decided that MySpace is the perfect medium, and lonely MySpace users whose paltry handful of friends isn't enough to satisfy their desire to be one of the "cool kids." In both cases, it's somewhat sad and an awful reflection on what MySpace has become, now that everyone's attention has turned to Facebook instead.

The service is simple: Just give the MySpace Friend Adder your "friend code," a number in your MySpace profile, and the service presents you with a screen of friends you can automatically add to your MySpace profile. It's likely that all of those accounts are set to automatically accept friend requests, and it's likely that all of those users have also used the Friend Adder in the past. Either that or the service just mercilessly hammers random MySpace users with friend requests.

The service gives out "friend points" for using it and for adding friends who in turn add you back. What those points are good for is anyone's guess, but some people are apparently dependent enough on the service to bolster their friends lists that they've collected upwards of 150 points. (It's worth noting that the users with the most points are all marketing services.) You can shell out $3 to be a VIP for a day, and up to $60 to be a VIP for two months, whatever that might mean.

The MySpace Friend Adder proves that MySpace is either going down the tubes or that social networking of the MySpace genre is a sham. I'd like to believe that it's more the former than the latter, but I'm sure that you could argue both based on the existence of "friend adding services" as a genre.