I don't like MySpace

Published 2006-12-16 at 22:42:50Z under homepage, web

It seems like everybody does MySpace nowadays. Consequently, MySpace is making
an absolute killing in ad revenue and is worth billions of dollars. But despite
all of that, it still looks like somebody's pet web project run out of their
garage.

I'm the type of person that is hard to impress when it comes to a company's web
presence. If you're supposed to be a tech company, but you have a shitty web
site (poorly built, poor use of technologies, poor adherence to best
practices), I'm going to think your IT department produces shitty work, and
that completely undermines your appearance as a technically competent company.

But I can forgive that in certain situations. If someone has a really great
idea, and executes on a low budget, I can understand that it's more important
to get your idea out there than it is to do everything correctly. But how many
years does it take before you revisit some of these decisions? How many
billions of dollars does your company have to be worth before you can start
investing in a web development staff that isn't producing stuff that could be
confused with a high school computer science class project?

To start with, the standard MySpace page is visually horrible. The only
redeeming quality seems to be a semi-consistent use of color. The fonts are
differently sized and differently spaced. Nothing lines up. All I want to do
when I look at my page is figure out how I can fix it.

The "good" news is that you sort of can. By embedding <style> tags within your
text blocks, you can alter the presentation of the page. But I get the distinct
impression that this was an oversight, not a feature, and they just let it
continue to work because so many people like it. "So great," I think, "I'll
just make the page look like I want it to look."

That's where the next issue appears: the markup is horrible. It's one nested
table within another. There's no use of semantic markup whatsoever. No
headings, no semantic blocks, no nothing. You have class names like
"orangetext15", and instead of margins and padding, you have &nbsp; spaces
moving things around. So great, you can change the font and some colors, but
you can't make any meaningful, targeted changes to the layout without using
some advanced CSS selectors, which the majority of browsers don't support.
Consequently, the best style sheet to use is the one the layout was originally
designed for: the default.

The second issue is that they aren't really embracing any new technologies. My
list of MySpace "friends", bulletins, messages, etc., could trivially be
exposed as a syndication feed (Atom/RSS), but they don't do that. No, you don't
get the ad hits, but don't you think a "MySpace messages" or "MySpace friends"
list on another web site might just drive traffic there?

MySpace reminds me of someone's jaw-dropping, grandiose PhD thesis: Good idea,
good implementation, but totally abandoned after the payoff. It's running on
autopilot just when it has the most opportunity to do some really cool things.

π
© 2006-2008 David Nesting. Some rights reserved, unless otherwise noted.
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