Lost in Seattle

Against my better judgment and sense of antiestablishmentarianism, I signed up for a MySpace account a few months ago. Some competetitor on some reality TV show that shall remain nameless was rumored to have a MySpace “space,” and I thought one needed an account to view it. What do I know about the kids these days and their rock-n-roll music, hula hoops, and social networking sites?

My forgotten account lay dormant until the other day when my Bus Friend, Molly, mentioned she had one and was keeping a blog on the site (which is highly amusing, but is for “Friends Only”).

As I was poking around MySpace and trying to figure out what all the hype was about, the whole thing really began to annoy the hell out me.

Now, from the early days of Geocities on forward, free web hosting services have certainly attracted their fair share of people whose sense of design can only be described as Trashy Baroque. In the electronic medium, it’s far easier for people to slap up obnoxiously busy wallpaper, eye-injuring colors, unreadable fonts, and overall appalling layouts. MySpace makes it insanely easy to indulge all of those bad habits, and adds — nay, encourages obnoxious auto-loading audio on top of it all. [I should note that Molly’s site is sparse and clean, and employs none of the aforementioned irritations.]

I decided to spend some time futzing with my “MySpace” space over the weekend and try to overcome some of the site’s limitations. I don’t want to get to “into” MySpace, but I figure having a presence there might drive a little more traffic to this blog. My goal was to make it look somewhat like this site.

What I discovered is that the design (I use that term loosely) tools available on MySpace are terrible and inconsistent. On some pages, after you enter text and click “Save,” the confirmation page gives you no easy way to get back to where you came from. But, on some pages there is a link back to what you just edited, or a preview option. It just seems utterly random. It took me forever to figure out how to upload a photo for my profile, for example. The text entry boxes encourages the use of CSS to modify the default styles, but they offer no indication of class names or anything useful to help you do it (short of viewing source). It is nearly impossible to design a decent looking site with the available options.

The fact that the MySpace developers invested the bare minimal amount of effort in creating the service is evidenced by the following egregious display of programming laziness:

It takes a single friggin’ conditional statement to remove the “s” from “Friends” if CountOfFriends == 1. This is simply inexcusable.

I eventually found a MySpace profile hack that hides most everything on the default page and allows you to enter an entirely new page in its place. The results can be attractive, but the technique violates the MySpace use policy. There’s are more “legal” approaches described at designer Mike Davidson’s site. But all these hacks require far more work than I am prepared to invest.

MySpace has become enormously popular despite these shortcomings, and legions of 12-year-olds have figured out how to use it and establish vast empires of “Friends.” My optimistic hope it that budding web designers and developers will learn from their frustration in fighting with the MySpace interface and will develop better tools and technologies in the future.

But deep down I know that most people just don’t care.