For the love of bacon will someone tell me the difference between spider man and ultimate spider man?!

The storylines are just different. It's the same characters in a different storyline.

" The storylines are just different. It's the same characters in a different storyline. "

oh. thx 

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Aren't the Ultimate comics also designed for a younger audience or something? They always seem far more wacky than the standard Spider-Man, X-Men etc.

Let me get nerdy for you: 
 
Amazing Spider-Man takes place on Earth 616, which means that all of the backstory is still there from when Spider-Man first appeared.  Ultimate Spider-Man takes place in the Ultimate universe, which was a reboot setup by Marvel in order to take away all that backstory and basically start fresh.
 
The Ultimate stuff does typically tend to appeal more to the current generation of youngsters and teenagers as a way for them to get into comics, especially because Peter is still in high school in the Ultimate universe.  Amazing Spider-Man has been married and grown up, etc etc etc.  Ultimate is also a bit more modernized than Amazing in terms of the storytelling. 
 
SOOOOO...everyone that has been saying that Ultimate is not a different dimension...is wrong.  It absolutely is by the standards of the comic books.

Ultimate Universe had Spider-Man going through "several" serious mutations. There was also a whole bunch of Spider-people (as I recall) Mary Jane also got powers. Peter Parker was cloned 6 times, making him A Symbiote, 6-armed Spiderman, and various others. Ultimate Spidey was also Carnage.

youre thinking of the clone saga. that has nothing to do with the ultimate universe.