Cleaning Up Your MySpace Profile: The Online Version of Tattoo Removal

From the Wall Street Journal:

Not long ago, searching the Web for the name Craig Pratt turned up a photo on Pratt’s personal Web page showing a pair of jeans-clad high-heeled legs in the air with Pratt standing between them…

A few months ago, Pratt, who is 22 years old, suddenly felt the need to kill that online self. He had just landed a job interview at a San Francisco public-relations firm. “I started freaking out,” he says, worried that his potential employer might discover his rowdy online identity at MySpace.com…

So he created a brand new online self, composing a new profile … He changed his favorite book from Honcho, the hardcore magazine for gay men – a joke, he says – to “the complete works of Charles Dickens.”

But inventing a new self was much easier than killing the old one. He says he emailed MySpace, begging the site to take down his old page. Nothing happened … Finally, he received a cryptic email telling him to write his user name – “craigisanidiot” – and password with a marker on a piece of paper, to take a photo of himself holding it up, and to email it to MySpace along with a note saying, “I wish to be removed from MySpace.” His bawdy old self finally disappeared.

Pratt’s story reminds us of the PR major who bragged to her college paper about having “had sex in cars about 40 times.” And it makes us wonder again about the Saugeen Stripper’s (see above) career prospects.

Of course, the more time we spend on MySpace — checking out the sex-and-booze-drenched ramblings of many members — the more we think MySpace will ultimately be deluged with thousands of “I wish to be removed” pics just like Craig’s.

Think of it as the online version of tattoo removal — often necessary, and never painless.

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