Buhner Dot Com Est. 2000, which is like 1947 in Internet years.

15 Minutes

So I've got a MySpace page. No big deal - it's mainly to throw something out there and keep in touch with people I haven't seen in a while. Being out of high school though is a negative - it seems 96% of people on MySpace are between 14-21.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, I looked for a few people, put a few pics up, and put people I knew in my friends list. As of 24 hours ago, I had like 11 friends, 5 messages, and about 30 profile views. This was how it had been for a few days now (I've had the profile up for about a week.)

I finished up the Eddy post on here, and sent a link to it to one of my friends from high school (who's on MySpace), and she writes me back to ask if she can bulletin it out. That's fine with me - more readers here the better.

I check my email in the afternoon, and I've got a friend request. I don't recognise the guy, but I assume he somehow knows me, since he asked to be added. I don't publicize my page. I read his profile, and it still doesn't ring a bell, but I notice he's an EMT. Shrug.

Then all hell broke loose.

I notice that my profile hits have jumped to three digits. I've got a few more messages. I'm starting to get several friend requests. This is around 3:45 or so. I'm trying to figure out where the people are coming from - they couldn't have all come from Leah's announcement of my blog, could they?

As it turns out, no (but thanks for the plug, Leah). By about 4:30, I had sent a message to one of the people who had written me about how she had found me, and I sent an IM to my wife about how weird it was - at the exact same time, she had IMed me to tell me someone had seen me in the "Cool New People" on MySpace. Basically, people who were going to the main page were seeing my profile (randomly - I never saw it live) when they logged in. Proof is here.

By 5:40 PM (about 2 hours after I'm guessing this started), I had 36 new messages and 87 new friend requests. My profile views went from 30 to 1,803.

By 8:10 PM, 60 new messages, 198 new friend requests, and 3,991 profile views.

Right now (and I'm pretty sure I'm out of the rotation now), 4,676 profile views, 235 friend requests, and something like 70 messages, which leaves me with a bit of a dilemma - who the hell do I accept as a friend? I can't accept everyone - I don't want people I'm close with to get lost in the mix. But at the same time, I don't want to just cast aside people who seemed nice enough and wanted to add me.

Now I'm not up on the whole MySpace thing. There might be people who just want to have the highest number of friends, so they just randomly shoot invites to people. How do I tell those from the people who are vaguely interested?

I've still got 209 people in the queue of friend requests, and that's not counting the people who sent me messages but didn't send official friend requests. I've only rejected two people, and that was because one had a naked picture in "her" profile, and the other was a wannabe Paris Hilton-type who was from Guam (sorry Jax - I should have saved her for you).

I'm probably going to accept most firefighter/EMS types, mainly because whether you get along with them or not, it's always cool to have connections to fire departments everywhere to hear about other experiences and maybe trade patches. The couple of 14 year olds I've gotten I'm probably going to reject - that's just a little weird (no offense to those who sent invites).

Guys who sent me messages calling me a fag? Thanks. You've been reported.

The people who sent me messages thanking me for being a firefighter? Thanks - especially after getting portrayed as an overspending drain on the community with a country club firehouse, galavanting to vacations at $500 a night hotels. I must have missed that vacation invite when I was trying to find money in our budget to buy $9 t-shirts. THANKS NEWSDAY.

Anyway, if you've sent me a friend request or a message and I haven't responded, feel free to send me another one - you might have gotten lost in the mix and I'll be happy to add you if you really want to be added.

Ugh - that fire thing in Newsday is still bothering me. More content for later, I guess.