Tom Is Not My Friend
Written by Andrew Pearlman (contact - e-mail) -- April 23rd, 2007 | Recommend ThisSo, I finally did it… Heavily influenced by a close friend, I broke down and made a MySpace account. This is most definitely not an uncommon occurrence as there are about elevendy-billion profiles on the site today, but for me it is a big deal. I’ve never been a fan of social networks and their ability to let your distant acquaintances get a SnapShot ™ version of your personal life. So what is the first thing I see when I make my profile? Half of some dude’s back turned to look at me with a smile. You may know him as Tom.
After the initial wave of euphoria of having a new friend so early on in my MySpace experience had passed, I began to wonder: If Tom will be my friend, and your friend and everyone’s friend, how is that special? Not to mention that he is the one who supposedly created MySpace, the epitome of online stalking and bite-sized gossip. Immediately, I knew what I had to do… remove Tom as my friend.
That got me thinking, how many people delete Tom and how long do they wait? I took a sample of users who signed up in January and watched them through the end of March to see if and when they removed Tom from their friends list.
I was surprised that 30% of users who removed Tom did so within their first hour of signing up which leads me to believe that either this was not their first profile or they are just as skeptical as me of having a token friend.
Other fun MySpace Facts.
- For accounts created in January the average user waited 10.9 days to remove Tom
- 17% of accounts created in January removed Tom before the end of March
- For every 10 new accounts created from January through March, 9 people from the full MySpace member base removed Tom from their profile
- At the time of this post, Tom has 173,366,273 friends
- If one person was to sit in front of their computer for all attention spent on MySpace in March it would take them over 2,900 years
Hey Tom, if you were really my friend, how come you weren’t there for me when I broke up with my girlfriend two weeks ago? Why didn’t you call me up and say, “Lets go see Hot Fuzz this weekend”? Yah, thats what I thought. Later Tom, see you around.
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Get the 
April 23rd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Tom is the worst friend ever… Ever.
April 23rd, 2007 at 4:36 pm
What a jerk. Stay strong, Andrew, stay strong. Maybe you’ll find a new girlfriend through one of the many, many personal ad websites advertised on MySpace.
There should be some kind of “Help, I need a friend!” button on MySpace for those critical times…otherwise, what’s the point of having friends? Maybe “Click here for a hug”.
April 27th, 2007 at 4:23 am
Nice facts.
If you are Tom’s friend does it make us friends…
May 14th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
I kept tom as my friend. I need friends.
May 20th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Tom is there to help you if you have problems with your myspace account. So stop whining. Tom may not be a close and personal friend but like i said he will help you if you have problems with myspace. so, u do know how many people our on myspace ? billions and tom doesn’t have time to listen to your flippin girl problems cry me a river
May 21st, 2007 at 7:59 pm
im sorry i did not call you up. truly to me i could care less about your social problems. just think why would she break up with you? maybe because you want pepole who are not even your freind to call you up and see hot fuzz?
May 14th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Wow, some people have apparently never heard of sarcasm.
P.S.: Tom’s a douche!