Social media is an interesting phenomenon. I was doing an interview the other day and was asked about something that happened a few years ago. And suddenly, I remembered Myspace. Of course, Myspace is now of no relevance to anyone – a miasma of banners and nonsensical complexity, lacking only an animated tumbleweed avatar upon logging in to indicate the level of interest people have in it. It’s easy to forget that it was once a useful promotional tool for musicians – a vibrant and expanding community of people all doing similar things and sharing similar interests, with a simple interface and plug-ins that enabled you to advertise gigs, add songs, send bulk messages to groups, etc. And then it quickly descended into the shambolic spamfest it has become.

Whilst Myspace floundered, Facebook went from strength to strength, emulating much of Myspace’s functionality, with the bonus of instantaneous feedback from ‘friends’. Like all networks, it had it’s foibles, but, after some reluctance, I embraced it and soon found it had become an important tool in promoting what I do. Back when I signed up, events invites, annoying apps, messages, updates etc. were all automatically assigned to separate folders, so irritation was kept to a minimum.

Events were a simple case of creating, adding the relevant detail, and sending messages and invites to all your friends. Back then, it was easy to search people by location, and then add them to groups, so that when invites were sent, they only went out to those most likely to attend. The mail box was also a useful way of securing work and making new business contacts.

Then it all started to go wrong. It’s as if the people who designed Facebook were sitting around twiddling their thumbs and watching as more millions of people signed up. And, bored, they decided to start tweaking. First, the search-by-location option disappeared. This meant that adding people to area-designated groups became time-consuming, and increasingly difficult – especially if someone didn’t display information relating to where they lived.

The tweaks continued to the point where creating an event and sending invitations to that event took the best part of a day. This being ridiculous, bands were left with no option but to send bulk invites to all group members. And, in the meantime, Facebook had made it that all event invites came under one ‘notifications’ banner, and ended up in your mail box. With 5000 friends, this resulted in an insanely clogged-up inbox, making the mail function redundant because it was no longer possible to locate messages that were intended for you to read. You know, the important things, like people offering you work, or asking about releases, etc.

Not surprisingly, people grew increasingly annoyed, receiving countless invites to events in other cities and countries. Rather than looking at what they might have done to create this situation, Facebook took measures to make it even more difficult to invite people to events. One of their latest steps has been to ‘archive’ (more accurately, disable, then delete) groups. The end result of this being that one can now only create an event from a personal profile.

The final straw for me came a few days ago when I tried to do just that. A gig. 5000 friends. I don’t know where they live. So I invited them all, adding an apologetic note to those in foreign parts to whom the invite obviously would not be relevant.

A couple of days later, Facebook removed the event, and permanently blocked me from creating future events. Apparently, by creating an event I was violating the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities relating to my account. I can’t get any clearer answer from them, other than it looks highly likely that they are going to delete my account.

I sense the Myspace tumbleweed is blowing in another direction…

That said, I encourage everyone to follow me here, and also to join me on Twitter, which, for the time being at least, remains simple and sensible…

I suppose social media is a bit like the Hollywood cliché: ‘1. Who is Clint Eastwood? 2. Get me Clint Eastwood. 3. Get me someone like Clint Eastwood. 4. Who is Clint Eastwood?'  Facebook is fast approaching the Question 4 stage.