Myspace was launched in April 1999 and was one of many sites such as friendster, livejournal, bebo, orkut, faceparty, friendsreunited to name a few which attempt to be internet social networking sites.
MySpace is apparently number 4 in the top 500 sites according to Alexa (after Yahoo, MSN and Google).
There’s an interesting one at number 45: 72.14.203.104
Which is the IP address for google
Anyway, back to Myspace. The original site was then sold to Tom Anderson, the founder of 2003’s Myspace and a group of programmers and at some point in the next year it became huge. This was further exemplified when a British band, the Arctic Monkeys reached the number 1 spot in the singles chart without being signed to a record label – their fans created a myspace site to share their music in around 2003-4
Myspace was part bought by Intermix Media inc which was acquired in 2005 by Fox Broadcasting (Rupert Murdoch’s Company)
Where am I going with this? There’s nothing new here and you can find all this out with a google search or on wikipedia
– This is just the preamble
I created a profile in December 2005 ish, i think but did nothing with it. Around February next year people started asking me whether i had a myspace because everyone has one. I said something to the effect of “yes, but i don’t really use it”. What happens? they find me and add me as a friend, so now i have to put something up. I quickly add some basic info and kind of get into how it works, but it’s rubbish!
It’s a blog, info, dating, comment leaving, music sharing mish mash of web space. And it does none of it properly!
If you want a blog, use proper blog software such as wordpress or moveable type which you can install on a proper webhost. You can change the php, add themes, maintain the sql database from your webhost, ftp files etc…
What has myspace got? a profile where you can append a bit of inline css in the profile. This does allow you to change the page design, but it’s a nightmare and not very intuitive. Is myscpace W3C compliant? Let’s find out… surprise surprise, even the front page has 103 errors. I put the url from my myspace and it had 255 errors including the classic no doctype found which is very lazy programming. Nice one myspace, get everyone producing non-compliant pages as per W3C on the internet – as if there wasn’t enough out there already.
You can edit the blog entries when you’re logged in but you can’t have anywhere near the control of a proper blog. You can’t add plugins, or customise things.
If there’s a link on the page there is no way you can change where it goes to or remove it (eg I can’t link the blog on myspace to this one), and it has lovely ad banners all over the place which you have no control of. It’s all coded into the core part of the page which everyone has to have.
The dating aspect of it is just an added encouragement for the are wannabe porn stars and models trying to get some money out of you
The music concept is slightly more interesting, but only if you set up a band page. A regular profile doesn’t let you upload files, and you can only have music files from another myspace band profile. The band profiles are quite good in terms of being able to promote themselves and getting your music heard. You can choose whether to have the files as streaming or downloadable or both.
Bulletins are a feature where people send something to everyone in their myspace friends list, but the only way you can view it is to go into your members area where a tiny box showing the last 5 broadcasts will appear. It will not email you to say that someone has broadcast something. In contrast to invitations which will email you but are also difficult to find if you don’t click the link. It would be quite possible not to know that you have received bulletins unless you looked for them
There’s the overall bit that I can’t stand – the horrific use of shockwave – every page uses far too many shockwave elements that slows things down to a crawl – i find it intolerable.
The site has never managed to remember my username and password despite me telling both keychain and clicked the remember password every time i’ve logged in. It will not let you view parts of other myspace sites unless you’re logged in, and when you do enter your details it takes you back to the main home page. If you have multiple tabs open with myspace sites in each, and then login on one it will not make you logged in on the others when you click links – the logged in status is only valid for that tab/window which is ridiculous and suggests serious problems with the cookie system.
Having said all that the thing that annoys me most is the comments feature. Most of the people i have on my friends are people i know in the real world. They mostly have my email address, aim screenname, msn name, mobile number, some have my home number and possibly my work number. But how do they choose to contact me usually involving a question? By leaving a comment on my myspace – this is stupid on more than one level. Firstly it is unreliable about whether i will get an email telling me that someone has commented and even then i may or may not want to put myself through the pain of looking at my profile to read the message (as unlike wordpress the notification will not contain any portion of the message). Next, comments are a bit like a mix between a forum and a guestbook with a twist…. you can’t add comments on your own myspace!
So what people tend to do is reply to that comment on the person who posted it’s myspace. This makes it doubly ridiculous for someone else reading a comments section, as it will make no sense. Each comment will be a potential continuation of a comment on another myspace so has no flow and serves little purpose after it’s been read.
Some are learning that I don’t like using myspace for communicating, but not everyone
I’m not the only person to think there’s problems with myspace:
myspace sucks and so do you according to Katie McIntyre & Casey Primeau
I haven’t factored in any of the hotlinking problems some websites are having due to the increased bandwidth. This is a direct consequence of myspace not letting users host files on their space so everyone hotlinks.
There’s the more sinister side where myspace ruins lives as it is a honeypot for pedophiles and child molesters around the world
It is a bit reminiscent of Microsoft – the most popular site for social networking and it’s horrible – most users doesn’t mean best.
40 million people using it so it’s gotta be good! right?
Approximately 90% of computer users run Microsoft Windows and a large chunk of them probably think it’s the best operating system to use or have never used anything else so it’s gotta be the best, right?
In conclusion – myspace waste of space – some of the ideas of it are good, but the execution is poor
