Okay, for a long time now, I’ve had this love/hate relationship with MySpace. I love that fact that I know every time I meet someone there’s a 99.9% chance I can find them on MySpace and keep in touch and such. I HATE the fact that they don’t seem to be able to do ANYTHING right.
Case and Point:
Event A: They decided to steal Facebook’s features. I’m fine with this, I mean its not surprising, and at least they’re stealing good great ideas.
Event B: They do a terrible job of re-implementing said stolen features.
Event C: They end up with an even worse user experience afterwards.
A good example of this is in two distinct and relatively new features. “Friend Status” and “Friend Subscriptions.” Two features that are clearly COMPLETE rip-offs of Facebook’s “Status Updates” and “News Feed.” Again, I’m fine with this, as most of my friends haven’t made the jump to Facebook yet, so I’d love to stay updated on them using these types of features. However, on Facebook, the news feed is compiled automatically and put together for you based on who you talk to most and you can even configure what types of stories and people you’d like to hear more or less about. On MySpace, “Friend Subscriptions” forces you to subscribe to friends one-by-one. And they don’t even put a button on the profile pages to do this. So you’re forced to search through hundreds of pages to find the person you’d like updates on and then click a check box then click save. Then when you view your updates, you see stories about them uploading pictures, videos, etc. You DO NOT see stories such as “Person A posted a comment on Person B’s page.” MySpace could NOT pull off stories like this because their databases and code base are just too convoluted. There’s tons more small problems with this feature, but I’m already rambling. Moving on to “Friend Status.” On Facebook, I can click my “Friends” tab, and see a paged out list of my friends with the most recent status updates at the top. I can also filter, search, etc. (BTW: Facebook’s site layout/organization/feature set/etc is LIGHT YEARS ahead of anything MySpace has ever and most-likely will ever do). Anyways, back to “Friend Status.” I can update my status on my Home Page. Pretty much a direct feature rip from Facebook, but again, I’m fine with it, because its a good feature. However, when I click to “View All” of my friend’s status updates. It shows me ALL of my friends on ONE page. Are you kidding me? As of this post, I have 22,319 friends on MySpace. I know not everyone has this many but most people have at least 500. And listing out 500 users on one page with no apparent order to the list is the web application equivalent of telling someone to go to hell.
I have to digress so I can work on my iPhone MySpace web application, but please, if anyone reading knows anyone at MySpace, tell them to read what I’ve posted here, and feel free to get in touch with me as I have about a million other simple, small fixes that would make the site be a MUCH better place.
Thanks for reading.
Brian Shields on April 4th, 2008 at 10:50 pm says:
Does this mean you won’t add me?
Love the writing..
Maz Hardey on April 5th, 2008 at 1:34 am says:
Couldn’t agree more. I’m another MySpace ‘hater’, Facebook ‘lover’. I’m also coming at this from a smug university’d networked perspective. i was on Facebook from the beginning when it was all about the .ac, .edu address to secure your user network. MySpace seemed to be an open free for all mileu by comparison.
Despite opening up to everyone, Facebook retains a friendlier sense of non invasive and not as dependent ease of navigation. I find that the feeds generate what I want to know without me having to click, clunk and subscribe in a ‘tell me’ MySpace way. Fortunately I deleted my MySpace account some time ago. i won’t be led into hostile waters again. And do take delight in finding other SNS cliques such as Twitter and TrustedPlaces; thank goodness for Web 2.0 diversity!
Francis on April 5th, 2008 at 7:02 am says:
Aha,
Myspace always send me some spam email even I never login to their website.
Elizabeth Potts Weinstein on April 5th, 2008 at 7:11 am says:
The thing is, I don’t think MySpace cares. They will add some features to make it appear to their MySpace-only people that they are making progress, but too much progress would probably mean re-writing their code — which is not going to happen as long as they are growing & making money with ads. The MySpace user interface is horrid. Anything that requires people know or use html to make a profile pretty is never going to attract the over 30-crowd.
evan on April 5th, 2008 at 9:11 am says:
ya. myspace is sucking.
i just wish more of my friends would switch to facebook.
daniel Morgan on April 5th, 2008 at 12:27 pm says:
I hate myspace too. It’s the biggest mystery why so many people are on it. I think the ‘my’ word is really appealing.
Mutha Mae on April 5th, 2008 at 4:37 pm says:
I’m not on it because I’m too old. It seems like a young person’s scene. I’ll stick to my own blog/vlog/video show format.
ashbloem on April 6th, 2008 at 7:37 pm says:
Fucking agreed. I’ve been meaning to write this for some time.
Sue on April 7th, 2008 at 7:47 am says:
The only downfall of Facebook? Application invites. hahaha. That’s the worst I can come up with. Best part? Customizable public profile. I can show what I want to show and keep the rest private. Can Myspace do that? No. hehe, loved this post!
brinkofacomplex on April 7th, 2008 at 8:06 am says:
Facebook now has a lovely new “ignore all app invites from this person” button that, along with the “block application” button right on the notifications page, takes care of the problem fairly well.
But I don’t know anyone who still uses MySpace anymore… Sucks to be you! ^^
Paul Cooper on April 8th, 2008 at 1:25 am says:
Nice, thanks for the add on twitter. Check out my myspace hates if you have time!
andrew wurster on April 8th, 2008 at 3:19 am says:
myspace is entirely lame.. I have never had so many lame stripper and generally dis-reputable people want to be my “friend” facebook is marginally better twitter is think is the best
Blaise Alleyne on April 8th, 2008 at 3:39 am says:
Amen. I hate MySpace too.
metah-4 genome on April 8th, 2008 at 10:15 am says:
thanks for following me on twitter! Just read your blog on myspace and am in total agreement… Myspace seems to “improve” just to wind up taking 4 steps back. Go fig…
Sethers on April 8th, 2008 at 2:37 pm says:
It’s almost been a year since I last logged into my MySpace (and it was a year before I did last year). When I did I was shocked to find the user interface had gotten even worse. It’s like running into an ex-friend that keeps getting uglier.
Rose on April 9th, 2008 at 8:10 am says:
MySpace’s ads are horrible, and the customizable backgrounds people do are aesthetically offensive. And yes, the stripper requests quickly got old, so I made my profile private… Maybe I’m too old for the site. I wish all my friends realized this and got off it.
Tiki on April 9th, 2008 at 6:09 pm says:
I too have a love hate relationship with myspace. Most of my hates include the newer updates, maintenance, not being able to even log on, and the fact that I’m force to have Tom as a friend even though I’ve deleted him numerous times.
Though, I also have a love hate relationship with facebook.
George on April 10th, 2008 at 4:31 am says:
Everything from UI to the code underneath is horrible about MySpace. The social networking space is getting pretty crowded now and they need to do something pretty quickly if they want to keep pace.
Most people I know have left it unless they are musicians.
Greg Rollett on April 14th, 2008 at 7:17 am says:
It’s easy to hate on them, however they do still have the user base and still rule in the entertainment category. If you want to connect with indie bands and find exclusive content, Myspace is still the place to be. Facebook is trying but failing to attract musicians and pull in CPM revenues that bands attract.
bhern on April 18th, 2008 at 12:53 am says:
I wish I even knew what you’re talking about. I don’t even use MySpace. I am now going to spend my remaining days watching VH-1.
Bryan Thomas on April 19th, 2008 at 9:26 am says:
Great post…
nimble2 on April 26th, 2008 at 7:48 am says:
I hate Myspace because it takes sooooooo long to load anybody’s page.
If a person sends me a link to their Myspace page, I email them back and ask why should I even waste my time.
Can’t the programmers clean up the loading time on that site.
TravelChick on May 3rd, 2008 at 5:57 pm says:
well said
Rock Adent on May 5th, 2008 at 11:18 am says:
Hi there, I know you from Twitter, and I want to say that Facebook has just getting better and better, let’s compare to MySpace and see and Facebook just owned it.
Patrick Tulskie on May 10th, 2008 at 3:46 pm says:
Jake - I totally agree. When they started redoing myspace and adding stuff I started using it even less. Facebook is leaps and bounds ahead of myspace in terms of not only ideas but also design and usability.
They just need to keep ahead of the game on their app stuff because right now THAT is becoming a mess on facebook pages that I really hate.
Duncan McDougall on May 20th, 2008 at 5:21 pm says:
Pretty much everyone I know has now made the switch from myspace to bebo/facebook. I think the general main reason is that people were sick of going on others profiles and having to wait 5minutes while every of there fullsized photobucket images and the 20 of their favourite youtube videos load. Added by the fact that 99% of them copied and pasted there code from somewhere because they didnt know html. Result: searching through a maze of shit to find the addme or post comment links.
Lenny Sherman on May 28th, 2008 at 4:02 pm says:
You can now hate on myspace user profiles on myhatespace.com
Hayley on June 14th, 2008 at 1:56 pm says:
Oo Myspace ruins ppls lives
Tracy on June 22nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm says:
True in all respects.
The only reason I still have an account is because I’m in the music business. Even then, all my friends are on facebook, I just use it to listen to, and occasionally contact bands.
Ronald A. Richardson on July 11th, 2008 at 4:43 pm says:
I agree, myspace sux. i started my own social networking website but it sux too, i haven’t worked on it in a looong time. but facebook rocks!