His Creepy Space

I am not a big fan of the social networking sites. Myspace.com has seemed to become the hangout for sexual predators and Facebook.com is a playground for those who are college aged but elementary minded. But if you enjoy the incessant influx of pointless surveys about your friends or find juvenile delight in the countless applications like superpoke then click away to either of these sites to fulfill all your geeky gleeness.

I must, however, admit that not everything about these sites is bad. I have found many of my old friends and coworkers on Myspace.com and Facebook.com that I wouldn’t have found by other means. I treat my accounts like additional email addresses and leave it at that.

Recently a new site has surfaced claiming that it is social networking for Christians called HisHolySpace.com. Intrigued, I ventured to this site just to check it out and quickly discovered that you can’t check out much of anything unless you have an account. I thought it over and decided that it would be cool to set up an account and try out this site as a way of critiquing it. Sounds like fun, right? Pumped with enthusiasm, I clicked my mouse button to start the process…which is where all the fun stopped.

I set up my account relatively quickly (even though the site was excruciatingly slow) and started poking around the site to see if there was anything of note. There was. First, your homepage at this site is basically your profile just like Myspace.com except that it is so full of unwanted advertisements and video clips that it is a pain to accomplish much of anything. Already aggravated I decided to leave it until the next day before making any more judgments.

When I returned I logged in and found that I have new messages. Goody goody. Upon opening my inbox I found that I had three messages: one from the site manager, one from a guy of 48 years old, and one from another guy who was 62. Not only did they message me but they posted comments to my profile.

I deleted both and started browsing random profiles. It didn’t take long to notice that everyone (including the girls) had the same postings on their profiles from the same guys.

After reading about 50 or so profiles from both girls and guys I found that this is by no means exclusively Christian and in fact found only about six profiles that sounded legitimately Christian.

Over the next two weeks, I engaged in an email conversation with a girl about her and my faith and about the site. And every day I had to delete more messages and comments from creepy old men. I actually started conversations with both a girl and a guy but oddly enough the guy was not interested with talking with other guys…weird, huh? My new friend ended up leaving the site because she felt uncomfortable by the creepy men and I left because I had had enough. We keep in touch on another site.

I think HisHolySpace.com is dangerous in that some will let their guard down thinking that they are at a Christian site when in fact it is just a poor Myspace.com knock-off with a seemingly Christian name. I would recommend steering clear of this site especially if you are a girl or have a daughter. You may find a real Christian friend (I did) but you have to wade through heaps of manure to find them and I believe there are better and safer ways to meet Christian people like getting out from behind your computer and heading to your local church.

Chris