Good fucking god do I hate the operators of MySpace. For what it is, MySpace is useful. It provides and easy way for friends to communicate and reconnect, but it is a horribly broken and inefficient tool. It seems that the idea, ever since Turner bought MySpace, is to create as many new features and gizmos as possible. Not a bad idea, considering MySpace really is a piss-poor barebones communication hub. The real problem arises when they introduce these features that stay, seemingly, forever in perpetual beta limbo. Take, for example, the layout editor. It's pretty snazzy and offers a wide array of customization. However, it only works on Internet Explorer. Firefox, which garners more users than IE7 (according to W3C) is left in the cold, which is completely idiotic. The only reason I can see why Firefox would be excluded is if the editor is an ActiveX component. And if it is, why the fuck would they do that? Use Java or anything else. ActiveX is horrendous and even Microsoft has recommended that IE7 users leave ActiveX turned off as default.
Instead of addressing this and many other issues, MySpace has decided to ratchet up the "annoying as fuck" scale a notch or two. MySpace is now bringing you Karaoke. Thank god. That's exactly what the broken mish-mash shithole of a site needs, more useless vids of worthless idiots. You're sitting at home online and suddenly you get an irresistible urge. You absolutely have to belt out R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly" and share it with the world.
You now have that ability, thanks to the new MySpace Karaoke, to be launched Tuesday by the social networking site.
MySpace co-founder and president Tom Anderson (known by many as the friend that comes automatically with a MySpace account) said MySpace and karaoke are a natural fit.
- Source
Yes, what a good fit indeed. Karaoke, a mindless and horrendous pop culture shitfest that showcases shortcomings and inadequacy to be coupled with a site that promotes superficial "social networking" by gaining "friends" that are really useless online personas that many will never meet in real life. Yep, sounds about right.
Does anyone actually care about Karaoke on MySpace? How about being able to mail more than one person? How about better forum services? How about fixing the constant bulletin board and mail timeout errors? How about fixing the layout editor? How about enabling true layout construction for people to really design their site?
In other words: Fix your fucking stupid broken shithole of a site. Adding more features does not make it better, it just adds more broken, poorly supported features that create a horrible user experience of glitches and errors. One only need to look at Yahoo to see where this "crank out the new features" business model goes.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
MySpace: a bevy of broken toys.
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2 comments:
In a similar fashion, facebook applications are bloody awful.
Not only are most of them ugly and horribly pointless, but there are also increasing privacy issues.The creator of an application can include malicious code to collect information on the people that install their application, and more worrying, anyone on their friends list.
When I first heard of applications, I thought that they could be really useful. If done similarly to Firefox extensions, they could have been brilliant. However, instead of offering functionality to individual users, they all require your friends to also have the application installed. The long term effect of this is that cunning application creators (who get a share of the ad revenue) will attempt to recruit as many users as possible to do their marketing for them.
End result? An inbox full of requests for bullshit, tonnes of friends with ugly profiles, increased commercialisation of 'the peoples communication platform' and zero improvements from where I stand.
I never got onto the facebook wagon. MySpace was enough for me and the shame is that it could be a much better site if they just took the time to update and refine it's core features before dolling out more useless crap.
That's interesting about Facebook apps. It seems that most of these "social networking" sites are more interested in trying to entice more users into their fold than in maintaining a well run site. Facebook should really reconsider the functionality of their apps if most o them are creating spam. It slows down their system and wastes a lot of their resources. Though my guess is that they are more interested in number of users than user satisfaction.
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