A Small Yet Fundamental Truth
Posted on April 25, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 36 Comments
There is nothing you can do to make a MySpace page actually look good. No matter what you do to them, they still end up looking like a genetic misfire between a 1996-era personal Web page and a screen full of Visual Basic buttons laid out by a monkey. I think so many people migrated to Facebook from MySpace for the simple reason that it gave their eyeballs a rest.
No, in the grand scheme of things, this is not a particularly important observation. Doesn’t mean it’s not true.
That is the main reason I am surprised so many people use MySpace, and also the reason I try like hell not to.
Granted, it takes a while, but finding a quality premade background *really* helps. I use WhateverLife, but again – you may have to sort through some horribly wretched ones to find what suits your tastes.
I like the “elegant” section myself.
I think Facebook is annoying and a stalkers paradise. MySpace is quickly becoming a Facebook clone, unfortunately.
Yeah, and try reading a myspace page with a screen reader. Literally not possible. I don’t care who you are or how bad I want to find out what your fav song is and how many “friends” you have, I’m not sitting through that mess.
Amen. When you get a Facebook notification from me, please delete it, it was an “oh, fuck, that did NOT just happen” moment.
I have a very nice younger cousin that I am trying to ween off of installing all those lame apps. I use Facebook to play Scrabulous.
I once dated a girl who made me get a myspace. All I got were a bunch of friend requests from porn sites. I hated her page, pink on black is terrible, but pink on pink and black is just unreadable. Needless to say, I deleted my account the second I dumped her
All social networking websites are terrible.
Some, however, are more terrible than others.
I certainly migrated to FarceBook for that very reason. If you give people the (somewhat limited) freedom to customise their pages, the vast majority will become hideous insults to the internets. FarceBook may have its many flaws, but at least it’s clean.
To be fair, actual monkeys might do a better job of it. All they know is earth tones.
So ugly, it inspired a contest to see how ugly things could get…
Counterexample and detailed explanation of how counterexample was created.
Tania, there’s an add-on and a script you can install in Firefox that will auto-reject any app invitations and then block that app. Info here: http://tech.karbassi.com/2007/09/19/automatically-block-facebook-applications/
#8 Darkwinter: what he said.
I’ve long said that MySpace is the new GeoCities. A simple website that any n00b can throw together the worst possible design, add a bunch of colored effects and think they’re cool.
It wasn’t cool 10 years ago and now with higher bandwith they’ve just moved on to adding really crappy music along with the crappy visuals.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve visited either of those sites. Not so interested.
YES! Which is why I hate MySpace.
It is technically possible to make it look good, but it takes some serious CSS hackery.
There’s a subset of the web design industry devoted to churning out MySpace layouts. This makes me weep for my profession, and yet they probably make more money than I do. (Then again, I work for the state, so the bar’s kinda low.)
… and Jon types faster than I do.
Another small but fundamental truth: until the dimming of the sun, there will always be a MySpace equivalent.
I’ve ranted against MySpace on a several occasions with regard to its poor layouts and resource-hungry designs. I never go there. Facebook is much better all-around, but I still don’t even use it that much. Social profile sites just don’t really interest me all that much.
You can put me firmly in the “I don’t get it” camp for pretty much all social-networking sites. I don’t know if it’s because I work in high-tech and I’m offended at the sheer awfulness of the sites or the fact that I have no interest in a) sharing the minutiae of my life with others or b) reading about the minutiae of other people’s lives. I always figured they’re for people who somehow can’t handle setting up a LiveJournal account. My one exception – LinkedIn; it’s for keeping in touch with people where “friend” is much, much too strong of a word.
It doesn’t have to suck (warning – music. And you can’t turn it off. HAH!). But by and large it does, which is sad.
Facebook is sliding in the same direction, but the new facebook layout is going to put all the gadgets, gizmos, and do-dads on a separate tab, behind the stuff I actually care about, like your profile.
Can’t happen fast enough for me.
Tania, if that cousin is installing apps on your computer without your permission, I would suggest using the Gibbs approach to getting your point across. Give the cousin a firm smack on the back of the head.
Lisa L @ #12 – Thanks!
Johnny Carruthers @ #23 – no, she’s filling out the silly surveys and stuff and I get a request. Sometimes, I’m distracted and I hit the button before I go “oh, fuck, that did NOT just happen” and slap my forehead. I’m doing my best to get her to think before she clicks. Yeah, the irony doesn not escape me.
One does not merely sign in to MySpace. There is an evil there that does not sleep.
Eh, I’m mostly unimpressed with Facebook because of how hard it is to view profiles. If I’m just browsing around to check up on people I formerly went to school with or worked with, I don’t want to have to belong to some tiny little network to do so.
And a lot of people seem to choose the most narrowly focused network to belong to, which seems to defeat the purpose, to me …
Or maybe I’m just Doing It Wrong.
I’m not going near MySpace ever again. I once did to read a journal, and now I get tons of MySpace spam – most of it is probably porn stuff.
I delight in changing the file names of photos from my photoblog that MySpace idiots have hot-linked. And then going back a few days later and watch them complain about how their backgrounds changed and they don’t know how to fix it.
I know, it’s petty and passive-agressive. But it makes me giggle.
I got pulled into LinkedIn for work, but at least that is theoretically for making business contacts, and the layout is relatively spartan.
Burke — can’t turn off the musics? Watch me surf the web with a computer that has no speakers.
Dr. Phil
@Dr. Phil
Curses, my plan thwarted!
I’ll get you next time! AND THAT CURSED DOG, TOO!
For some reason (I already forget what), I created a MySpace account a few weeks ago.
The e-mails they send me are in Spanish.
The above is the most entertainment I have ever gotten out of MySpace.
On the life:-now-with-more-horrible-irony side of things, I wonder if Ashley Qualls makes more money than you…
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/118/girl-power.html
It’s entirely possible she does. Which is fine. Lots of folks make more money than me. I make enough, which is handy.
I only got a MySpace so that I could read my friends’ MySpaces. Every day I think about deleting my account. As for Facebook, I particularly like the security measures plus the fact that if I refuse to add any random applications then I don’t get spyware in my computer. It’s kinda nice because it allows me to keep up with friends I would otherwise have no way of contacting.
I only got a MySpace so that I could read my friends’ MySpaces.
See, this is why I’ve been avoiding MySpace. It’s a freakin’ gated community. “Wanna email this person? Gotta be on MySpace. Wanna read their journal? Gotta be a MySpace member. Wanna communicate with them AT ALL? Gotta be one of us!”
It’s like MySpace members are zoo denizens, and you can’t talk to them unless you resign yourself to jumping into the cage. Gah.
That said, there’s a certain amount of professional networking that goes on there. I’d been starting to consider getting one, just a placeholder, mainly, to point people to my actual web page. On a recent project, I probably missed out on scoring a couple interviews because the people I wanted to interview were behind the MySpace glass. Someone once told me that he considers the effort of getting a MySpace account in order to contact him a sort of test of willing for his potential business contacts – if they can’t be bothered getting an account to contact him with, he figures they won’t be willing to bother with other efforts necessary to make them worth his working with.
You can imagine what a relief it is to find so many people here saying they don’t have a MySpace page and don’t want one.
My gut instinct says that enough of the writing/publishing industry moves in the Open Blogosphere and other parts of the web that MySpace networking remains purely optional.