In return I promise not to send you endless messages about my great real estate opportunities, my seminars on how to feel really good about yourself, or offers of pictures of me that "MySpace won't let me post." I won't post animated graphics in your comments. I don't have MySpace's IM service installed, so you're safe from me there, too. Any bulletins I send will be rare and relevant. My own page will neither blink excessively, play any music at all, or contain color combinations that cause cancer in rats.

Which rather begs the question, what do I use MySpace for, anyway. But the answer is clear.

To collect friends. So get going.

Updated: I hit the 1,000 mark. And you can really tell the difference, I actually feel more loved. I'm all shivery now.

Getting Friends is simple on the insanely popular networking site MySpace.com. You find someone you want to be connected to and you click on their “Add Me” link, then you wait to see if your request has been deemed worthy. Suddenly their little avatar picture is in your Friends list, your picture is on theirs, you’re receiving each others’ bulletins, you’re connected! And another tiny community is formed.

Friending folks on MySpace — and yes, “friend” has become a verb, like "game," "blog," "google," and "shindig" — is how you keep in touch with them. You can see their current doings, hear the music they like, view their embarrassing pictures, admire (or cringe at) their choice of background designs, and compare your interests to see how cool yours are. Or, more likely, aren’t. And your Friend list displays the people that are now networked with you.

Some people limit the number of people they Friend to close acquaintances. Some, like me, go after the numbers. Not in an “I have more Friends than you, neener neener” way. More like “I am connected to the world, especially the parts of the world that obsess on font sizes.”

I will seek out Friends. I will hunt down anyone who might marginally be associated with me via the most tenuous of threads and attempt to bond with them. “You’re a professor of Chinese medieval history? I love Chicken Mai Phun! Add me!” I have casual Friends, celebrity Friends, artist Friends, activist Friends, musical Friends. I have Friends from junior high, high school, college, Friends from every place I’ve worked. I have Friends I happily added even though I could never stand them in person. Doesn't matter, I won't be interacting with them anyway. I just want them on the list.

Of course most celebrity MySpace pages are fan sites, or imposters, or run by an assistant/studio intern/flunkie, but occasionally you get someone like Nathan Fillion or Jon Favreau or Kevin Smith or Warren Ellis or Jenna Fischer who use their pages as a direct link to fans. Weird Al put out a call for MySpace Friends to appear in his last video. Every new movie has a MySpace page, and many of them offer promos, giveaways, contests, and insider tips. If, you know, you’re a Friend. And I am.

Even better is finding a new Friend who shares my interests, because then I can plunder his or her own Friend list like a starving moose diving into a buffet line. And new Friends I find there will have their own Friend lists, with even more Friends to go through and add. I can easily spend hours doing this, bouncing from one page to another and opening dozens of browser tabs so I won’t lose my place. This guy looks interesting and he Friended comedy horror writer Jeff Strand who Friended author Brad Listi (open his massive Friend list separately, to look at later), They Might Be Giants (add) and the Necronomicon convention in Tampa (add), and Necro’s Friend list brings me to artist Tara McPherson whose Friend list is populated with all sorts of comic writer, artists, and companies, and that’ll keep me busy for another few hours that I might otherwise have completely wasted actually making my own MySpace page something worth visiting, or talking to my family or something. Who has time for that?

None of this suggests that I am particularly liked, of course, or that MySpace connections afford me any sort of actual intimacy. You don’t get backstage at Bon Jovi’s concert because you’re on his Friends list (as far as I know, anyway). Most of the people I have Friended couldn’t pick me out of a police lineup. But they’re in my list and that gives me an indescribable psychological boost of a sort that I’m certain will soon have its own DSM-VII entry.

There’s also an odd thrill in looking through someone’s Friend list and finding a Friend you’ve already got. Mutual virtual acquaintances! It’s touching, somehow, in a removed way, like seeing a familiar name in a deposition.

Sometimes people send me Friend requests, which is the best. Someone out there knows me or stumbled over my profile and chose to add me to his or her own circle of acquaintances, no doubt using the same arbitrary and meaningless standards that I employ. Come on in, Friend, and be welcome! Occasionally it'll even be someone that wants to talk to me with some degree of relevance, which I consider to be an unexpected bonus, like if the latest stamp in your collection suddenly started giving you movie reviews.

I don’t add everybody. If the maybe-Friend’s page contains key phrases such as “exciting retail opportunity” or “check out the pictures MySpace won’t let me post,” they get denied. I’ll also bounce… no, that’s actually pretty much it. With one exception: I booted Tom right away. he just seemed too easy.

There are some drawbacks to being popular, of course. My bulletin section is now effectively useless, pulling in notices from hundreds of people so that any one really important bulletin quickly gets washed away in a flood of “Which Buffy Character Are you?” posts. (I’m Giles.) And getting spam from someone I’ve Friended hurts more than anonymous, faceless spam. It’s a betrayal. I thought I knew you, man. I thought we had something, something real… ish.

And choosing which Friends to make my Top Friends — the ones that appear on your profile page — is a constant battle of favoritism and spite. Are you in my favor this week? Refresh and see!

Still, I get a warm feeling when I check my page and see all those happy faces – or cartoon characters, or novel covers, or kittens or what-have-you – looking up at me. My Friends are all there, and we’re together.

Now it’s time to start sending all of them Facebook invitations…

I have a great idea. Original, startling, innovative. Guaranteed to get attention and maybe bring in some bucks. And I don't know where to talk about it.

I started to put it here where it would have the biggest audience, but froze when I realized that my MySpace page would have a broader reach. Then I backpaged and went to post it on my own Web site since anything major in my life should go there, even though I usually forget since the most major thing in my life is usually posting on a blog.

But wait, I've got a photo and a sketch. Should I Flickr it? Or put in on Facebook? Or DeviantArt? Should I post the artwork at ComicSpace.com? What about my LiveJournal, I haven't done much there recently and I think it needs hits every few months or it becomes a zombie page or something and goes out seeking other pages to devour.

Ooh, a podcast! I could record me talking about my idea which would, you know, somehow be more interesting than reading about it, even though my voice has been known to make cows dry up at twenty paces. Or, even better, I could film myself talking about my idea and put it on YouTube so people could see me in all my glory and, most likely, greenscreen me into a Toxic Avenger movie or The Phantom Menace or, possibly, both.

Or I could post it at any of the zillions of forums I frequent, where friends and enemies could argue and debate and help me develop it by supplying useful, detailed suggestions regarding the degree and intensity of my suckage.

An online petition, which I can then Digg and Slashdot and Fark and BoingBoing and Technoratize? Or maybe I should find someone to Wiki it for me…

No, no, I'm going about this totally wrong. This idea deserves its own Web page, with its own name and forum and viral marketing and logo and CafePress designs and everything. Press releases! Giveaways! Fan clubs!

That's it, I'm going with the new Web site. It deserves no less. You just wait until you see the debut of… of…

…I've forgotten my idea.

I may become a drinking man after all.

Yes, I have a non-Firefly life. I think. I had it here just a second ago…

(Link fixed to go to my profile page, and not to the annoying signup page)