Short comment on MySpace

MySpace. The name itself conjures ideas of freedom, about liberty to customize, change and design your own place in the Internet. The freedom does not always work; many youths and even companies have badly designed pages.

Personally I don't have very high opinion on MySpace -- the few profiles I've seen (even professional ones) seem rather clunky and remind me of the web pages I did during the late 90s in the IT-lab. I thought the reason for the pages to look so clunky was because the tools given for customization were hard to use, people were not trained in layout-creating (and thus adding the most clashing of colours and images to their profiles) and finally; because the people Just Couldn't Do It Right.

I seem to owe them an apology.

Yesterday I was bored and thus registered to MySpace. I thought it would be interesting to create a page, maybe do a simple and refined design to show how to Do It Right. As soon as I had finished the registration progress, I started browsing the account-settings. But.. where is the "Layout Settings"? Where do I change the background, fonts, tables-colours, link-colours?

After brief Google-search the answer dawned to me; the reason MySpace-pages look so bad is not because the customization tools are hard to use; it's because there are no customization tools. The pages code has to be set --by hand-- to the ABOUT ME-box. The attached image should make things clear.

I kid you not. All the MySpace design is entered into this box, titled "About Me". Those people with bad profiles? Those are the fucking gurus who fought a horde of dragons to get where they are. It's a miracle they get anything out of this at all. You can customize school property with axe easier - while your teacher is watching.

I have not seen such a bad design in ten years. Actually, not even then. I registered at Angelfire around early -98 (at least that's when my oldest file in the space was dated). It gave 15 megabytes of space, url and all it wanted was a banner on top. It had some limited custom tools; you could set the colours of the background and the text without knowing html. When I was 14, that was a really great thing. If you did know html, you could use that as well.
Of course, I didn't have anything to put on page - though I did try to create content few times (the front page I did back then, can be found here as well - made for 640x480 resolution).

It is miserable to note that as far as MySpace goes, it gives less chance to custom than a ten year old hosting site (which even by that time's standard was pretty basic).

So, what does MySpace offer then, if not your own space? Instant Messaging services; I suppose sending a message thru MySpace can be deemed to be less important, less direct, than sending email or contacting someone in MSN. Marketing products and networking. Exellent service for people who don't irc with a shell or know how to use forums.

I see no reason why there shouldn't be a custom-page in the settings. People seem to custom them anyway, and the lack of tools makes the end-results ghastly. Companies and groups that use the page for networking could easily make their page easily more attractive. This is the page of US Presidential Candinate. If this were a normal web page, I would laugh the designer all the way to the sea. I could do better. Infact, I have*. As things stand, I have to conclude that the writer was probably elite. And the guy who designed the Marine Corps-page? He must be some sort MySpace-Messiah.

But the fact still stands, that if the user interface were easier to use, you should not need sacrifice goats to dark gods to get to Barack Obama-class.

In conclusion, I have hard time understanding how this could be the sixth most popular page in the whole damn world. I can understand how the service the page offers could be needed.. but it's hard to believe that no other site has been able offer the networking and Instant Messaging with easy customization... or, have done so and made it popular. There is something really wrong with this world.

*I might add a link here once I get my web page back online.