May 15, 2006
MySpace... (Review)
is the Devil, or at least that is what I tell people publicly.
Roughly a year ago when I first heard about MySpace, I had my traditional response, "It's just another LiveJournal, god why are there so many of these damned things. It'll be just like instant messenger, I'll need an account on every friggin one cause my friends won't all use the same...". Rapidly degrading into one of my rants about society, the masses, our choices to follow fads and my general dislike of things in general. So I decided to not even bother looking at the web site and just pretending that I had never actually heard of MySpace, and that I would never need to, so it didn't matter.
Now, exactly what I feared has happened. A close friend of mine, and to be more specific, my fiancée’s sister, has gone to Alaska for the summer. She should have had cell phone coverage up there. But of course, Verizon slacked off again, said they covered it, but they don't. Verizon really is the Devil. So I get a voicemail from her boyfriend saying she is available on MySpace. Crap, damn, shit, expletive deleted.
I go to the site to see if I can find her account. First impression is not so wonderful, the ads get in the way, the CSS is mostly crappy, though that isn't MySpace's fault, that is due to the inexperience of writing good web code, and the fact that most people just plug and play bits of code into their profile. This creates horrendous web pages that barely render. Once over the CSS rant I finally find my friend’s boy friend that links to her. Having found them I suck it up and create an account.
Account creation was fairly simple without any real obnoxious steps. And I was quickly up and running and able to start doing things. At least it seemed like I was. As soon as I tried to add a friend I got a message saying that email was being worked on for some users. So I tried instant messaging my friend, that feature is down for weeks. Finally I found I was able to add their profile as a favorite and at least not loose track of them.
I next decided to try and add some useful information about myself. I managed to get my high school linked in from my home page, but then couldn't figure out how to add a college. Even went to the edit profile section at one point, but completely missed the "tabs" at the top of the page. Wasn't until the next day that I found out how to add other schools, companies, and change all the other information not on the first edit profile page.
The ads still piss me off, and the fact that there isn't an option to display both a nick name and your full name is rather irritation. Most people want to go by a screen name or a nick name, as do I, but it would be handy to see their full name in their profile, assuming that they allow it. Currently it can take some guess work to see if someone is who you think they are if they don't have up good pictures of themselves, or like some people have no pictures or only art.
Three days later and I'm up to thirty connected friends, with ten in the waiting for acceptance queue. About half of these are people that I don't talk to regularly if at all in years. Through most links I've made, I've found more people that I haven't talked to in years. It honestly seems like everyone is on this thing.
Ending thoughts. MySpace has a lot of issues and things that bug me, the worst is the repeated down time I find around sending email or adding friends. The ads could be better placed and less obtrusive, and there could be better control over CSS and code snippets forcing the user pages to render cleaner without as many problems. I do however strongly like the friend linking and the fact that all profiles are at some level open, so you can easily find friends through friends. Their contact importing should be expanded to include clients like Eudora, Outlook, LinkedIn and Plaxo. The internal email is one of the strongest features allowing people to communicate without giving away real email addresses.
Overall Rating: B-
Posted by ehunt at May 15, 2006 11:14 AMTrackBack URL for this entry: http://movabletype.mindflight.org/mt-tb.cgi/498.