MySpace Is Awful (Yet Number One)
Posted by Melanie Phung on Wednesday, July 12, 2006 at 3:47 pm
[rant]
Just when I think I have my gag reflex under control when it comes to that overrated behemoth MySpace, I come across this:
Currently, the three largest search related entities are Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Each entity is actually a vast and growing collection of hundreds technologies strung together to form relatively cohesive information storage and distribution machines.
MySpace is one of the top 3 search-related sites/companies? How is it search related? And “relatively cohesive information storage and distribution machines” is an apt description if you take out the “information” part (in fact, at this particular moment, their search functionality seems to be broken and the few profiles I tried to click on are all currently “undergoing routine maintenance”).
On top of being a usability nightmare, it’s also filled with crap, more crap, and extremely badly designed crap. (Anyone remember GeoCities? That’s what this looks like — without the excuse that we just don’t know any better yet) And most of the audience appears to be children and old perverts pretending to be children. Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair; but quality content is more an exception than the rule. Maybe that’s why Google passed on the chance to buy MySpace — after all, their mission statement is about organizing the world’s information, not about indexing every last thought that anyone has ever had. Or am I still being too Pollyanna?
But apparently the surfing (and searching) masses disagree: MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought for a cool $580 mil, claimed 4.46% of all U.S. Internet visits for the first week in July 2006, beating out all three search giants for the No. 1 most visited site according to just-released HitWise data.
[/rant]
MySpace could make the postings more usability friendly and less cluster. But then, it would have to “edit” the submitted content to make it fit MySpace video format. The MySpace community wants a social networking site, which MySpace provides. The community doesn’t want any modification to its submitted content, especially the artists who want to share their works in the manner they intend.
It is not avoidable that a web site is “undergoing routine maintenance”, giving the amount of data the social networking community uploads every day.
This MySpace power outage problem is getting ridiculous. Apparently it happened again on Sunday (yesterday). And the persistent down time is leaving MySpace users distressed and confused.
Traffic on my site doubled yesterday (still not saying much), and ALL of the new traffic has come from Google searches on some variation of the search phrase “MySpace routine maintenance”! Hilarious.
For those of you looking for information on how long it will take, I have no idea. Based on these last couple of outages I’d say at least 12 hours before you’re up and Web 2.0-ing again.
What bothers me more about MySpace is how, after all these millions of dollars invested, the site and service still looks pathetic. I refuse to put my band on it, just because everybody else is on it.
Gee, MySpace must be down for routine maintenance again. According to my referral logs, Google searches on “MySpace routine maintenance” are a big portion of my traffic once more.
For the love of 21st century technology — stop using MySpace already. It’s such a design and usability disaster that it doesn’t deserve your patience with all these repeated technical glitches on top of everything else!
Go get an account on LiveJournal or something.
Yea MySpace came in and took over..as far as traffic goes!!! Plus they’re making ALL that money!!!
I feel like I’m striking against MySpace. I found Yuwie where it’s more of a real community and they actually share their revenue with you!!!
I completely agree with you about MySpace being a design and usability throwback to the ugly Internet ’90s. It’s the Web equivalent of disco, only it isn’t being cleverly ironic. It just plain sucks. It breaks, is incredibly unintuitive, encourages clutter, and I don’t even think it does social networking very well… its raison d’etre.
I keep waiting for something to come along that shows a modicum of design sense and usability research behind it and for people to say “duh, what were we thinking with this MySpace thing?” And yet it keeps not coming along. Or people keep not noticing.