Schuetz

It's true.

Your ex could have viewed your myspace profile 44 times last week.

Your manager could be viewing your profile on a daily basis.

You could have some crazy cyberstalker that you don't know about.

Unfortunately you may never know, because Myspace doesn't allow you to see who viewed your page. That was until a little site popped up a while ago by the name of Profilesnoop.com.

Profilesnoop.com's motto is "Snoop on them while they snoop on you". How many of us haven't secretly viewed the pages of our exes, enemies, old high school crushes, co-workers, etc.? We all do it.

Profilesnoop.com provided you with a code to input into your myspace profile. This code would track all visitors that viewed your site, literally snapping a photo of them When you signed on your profilesnoop.com account, it had all that information neatly summarized and ready for you to view.

I was on the of the lucky ones who actually got to use it before it was shut down by Myspace. For about a week, I had this wonderful little tool on my profile. It was just a bit of code, entered in the "Who I'd like to meet" section, not visible to anyone but myself.

It captured photos of anyone who viewed my profile, along with the date, time and IP address. I would automatically be re-directed to a person's mypsace profile by clicking on their photo. Some were my own friends, others were a huge surprise. I found out that I was getting regular views from the last guy I dated and his on-again/off-again girlfriend. Who knew?

Of course, it was too good to last. Only five days after I registered with the site, the forums were buzzing with talk about the code being stripped from their profiles, along with all the text and photos in their "Who I'd like to meet" section. Apparently, the code is in violation of myspace's privacy policy.

By the next day, it was gone from my profile as well. I was sad to see it go. But it brings me to this question, is it right for Myspace to block me from being able to know who visits my profile?

I'm sure it won't be long before profilesnoop.com manages to find a way to get back up and running or all the other copy-cat sites start popping up. And when they do, I'll be there... ready to sign up.

Of course, if we do manage to find a way to see who's viewing our MySpace profiles, this means that others will know that we are viewing theirs. Would this damper our MySpace experience by making us think twice before "cyber-stalking" someone? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

Copyright 2006 Rebecca Fuentes