Back in August, Sean Bonner of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (a blog, not the seminal Jawbreaker record) posted an article titled MySpace Can Eat a Bag of Dick. It is a scathing indictment of MySpace based purely on the site's usability.

I keep getting e-mails from them that some skank named Jennifer has invited me to join her group "Hot Videos" but since I can't do anything with the e-mail I have to go to the site to take action on it. Except even though I was on the site hours ago it's forgotten my cookie and I have to login again. Except it says "you need to login to do that!" I need to login to login? OK, now, 3 pages later I'm logged in. And then I have to go home. And then I have to go to the mailbox. And then I have to go to the message. 6 pages later I finally get to this message and hit deny, to which I'm treated to a "sorry, you can't do this because we suck and are having errors or the atari 2600 box this whole site is running on just got unplugged or something" bullshit error message.

Read the whole rant here.
If you use MySpace at all, then everything in this article has happened to you. What's sad is that Bonner wrote this back in August, and if anything, it's gotten worse. The other day it took me six login attempts just to get to the stupid ad page. MySpace, if you're listening, fix your site. Oh, and I will never click one of your ads.

Facebook has problems of its own (maybe too much access given to friends, certainly too much to look at on a much prettier page than MySpace, useless things like Gifts, etc.), but at the very least, users can log in and see what happened while they were gone with very little trouble. Elements of pages can change without having to reload the whole page (a lá Google Calendar, Couchville, Yahoo!). And more than anything, it just looks better. Of course, you have to have a school email address to be a member.

Myspace's default pages are almost unreadable and their home page is so cluttered that if they ever moved the login box, no one would ever find it again. These are all problems before you get to the behavior of the people on the site. Pedophiles, murderers, stalkers, etc. I don't think it's completely the fault of MySpace, but it sure isn't making them look any better. I'll let the Attorney General of Connecticut handle all that, though. My problem is that there really is no other good alternative. There are other social networking websites, but many are a little too social for me. I don't think anyone really needs to know every single thing I am doing. I don't want to have to choose some dumb little icon to demonstrate how I am feeling. I don't want everybody to know what band I am looking up. It's not so much an issue of privacy as it is annoyance. I wouldn't want to see all those things as my friends did them.

One of the reasons MySpace is so popular (and say what you want about pageviews ) is that it is still a little private. Your space there is your own, and others can only access it or alter it (with comments) as you see fit.

I would really like to see a startup with this idea bring something new to the table. MySpace minus the overbearing greed. If anyone knows of a better MySpace (or wants to design or program one), leave a comment below. Let's start something better. Something where this never happens.

Soon I will check out Orkut, Google's MySpace equivalent, and Virb, which seems to be all about music. I will follow up and let you know what I think. In the meantime, let me know what you think about any of these sites, or any others.

Labels: Dumb, MySpace, Rants

This entry was posted by Power Rambling, on Monday, March 26, 2007. You can leave your response.