Jun
02
posted at: 10:54 AM
Anyone who has worked professional web in recent years has at least once taken a cheap shot at Myspace. And why not? There are plenty of reasons to rip the corporate sellout site a new one for creating a monstrosity of the mid-nineties about half a decade too late. I didn't just drink my own kool-aid there, did I? At any rate, we all know the story. Myspace was pre-IPO and supporting millions of users by a couple of scrubs, the ship was full of holes in that their server's were constantly at full load capacity, and it was only a matter of time before the highest bidder came along to salvage the barely functioning (we'll touch in design and usability later) storm.
Eventually, Captain Murdoch of the News Corporation came along and paid the highest price. That price was 1,625 Ferraris. Nice Ferraris. Since then there has been a notable trend (I wish I had a cool graph to show the data trends here) in the decrease of suck as far as functional failure of their infrastructure and production code, because Murdoch actually hired real programmers who are smart (my coworker went to their talk at a recent Microsoft conference). So follow closely now, the suck is decreasing here. While they were busy making the site unsuck from a functional perspective, they littered it with advertisements. Thanks guys, I really want to go see Oceans 13, and that ad for True with the girls' cleavage hanging out is really going to go over well with the parents. Murdoch and the Corporation of News (and other non-news related affiliates) had injected a now marginally-suck filled website with more suck than it had started with.
Fast forward to present day; the site is still stuck in 1996 aesthetically. Girls that aren't real girls want to show me their porn sites, Rock Bands got lazy and stopped doing real websites thus hurting the web as an artistic medium, and Tom gave 1,624 of his bestest friends a Ferrari. Everyone want's a piece of the pie of sin. It's like Vegas!
But why rip on Myspace unless we have something constructive and proactive to say, right? Well, it is quite fun, and they are easy to rip on. In all fairness, they deserve a chance at redemption. With News Corp backing them, they are positioned to make changes for the better, and more importantly, to salvage themselves before it's too late.
Markup. One of the main reasons Myspace gained an edge over Friendster and other social networking pioneers was it's customization appeal. I often feel bad for the poor kids who set out to learn CSS in order to customize their Myspace profile. That default css is tough to work with! Not to mention their standard markup contains a spaghetti sea of nested tables. The real reason they should fix their markup is to improve accessibility, cross-browser compatibility and search engine optimization (not that they need it).
Porn. Get rid of it. Aaaargh!!!
Advertisements. At least put some decent, creative advertisements in there if they're going to shove it down the users' throats.
Design. This should be easy and a no-brainer. Give user's more than one default template, and make them look pretty. It will encourage user's the stick around because they have something pretty to look at, and they won't flock to the next big shiny social networking site.
Usability. Hire a UxPx expert or an Information Architect, and make the site intuitive. Add more content. Take it to the next level beyond just a profile.
Ingenuity. The future of web is about syndication and cross-collaboration between applications. Expose an API, create larger feature sets to expand into other markets, or for God's sake please at least make an RSS feed.