Myspace: Hate it or love it?

I’m still a bit baffled why so many people love Myspace. It’s true that most Myspace users likely know little or nothing about the web and are probably just happy to have a little piece of the web that they can get to function. We must give Myspace some credit for becoming so popular in such a short time, providing a social environment for people to meet online. But at the same time terrible situations related to Myspace users are happening, such as in the Dateline NBC special, “To Catch a predator”, where online sexual predators have been caught red handed trying to hook up with teenagers.

In teaching web design I felt the need to finally address the Myspace issue. I have had students over the last few semesters ask me about myspace. And just recently some friends and family asked me to check out their Myspace layouts. I must admit – viewing the Myspace layouts I’ve seen thus far has given me a bit of anxiety. That’s right, just take a look at Myspace or any of it’s users layouts and you can find all of the things you’re taught not to do in web design. So I thought I’d address some of the things that were disturbing to see:

It’s super slow! A combination of excessive users and the less than standards compliant programming clearly affect the load time of Myspace. I’ve even seen multiple error messages loading pages on the few occasions I’ve visited this horrendous space of the web.

What size font is that? The layouts I had the opportunity to visit had very small fonts for body copy. Just as a guess it might have been a 5 pt font. I had to squint and look really close. Even then it was so small I could NOT read it – and I have 20/20 vision! Body copy should be between 10-12pts in size.

What usability? The usability of myspace is horrible – I would click on a blog entry to read it and it totally baffled me because the page was totally different. I went through a few pages before realizing the lovely back button was the easiest way to get around in Myspace.

Please kill the animated rainbow blinking gifs! You all know exactly what I’m talking about. Seriously they should be banned from the web. Luckily I don’t have epilepsy. These types of animated gifs could become problematic to those with epilepsy. (If you didn’t know that then this link will explain it well: http://www.usability.gov/web_508/tut-j.html) But take the word of advice from the article, “Just don’t put an epileptic person in front of your Web site to see if you can give him a seizure.”

Advertisements, poor graphics, blah, blah, blah! This just competes with what’s important – what a user would want to read or view. I know it’s hard to eliminate the ads because that’s how Myspace profits, but just adding images because it’s “cool” that you know how to do that – really isn’t that “cool”!

Watch the juicy details! And most importantly I want to caution users in posting all your daily thoughts in Myspace, but this really goes for any blog. Remember, whatever you post is permanently recorded – even if you delete it afterwards someone has likely seen the posting. So although it’s nice to be able to share tid bits of your life – you really never know who is on the other end reading. It could be your employer, a family member, or some psychotic online predator.

Until Myspace finds a way to develop their site so it is more standards compliant and controls some of the features users can add I can’t see any reason for using it. It gives people who know nothing about web design grounds to make the web even less usable. I think there are more effective ways to communicate online and share photos and share life events (cautiously) online. There are sites like wordpress, blogger, and flickr that are all free to use. They’re not quite the same social environment as Myspace but equally as effective.

So that’s my take on Myspace. Hate it or love it!

Other good reads about Myspace
Myspace, Facebook attract online predators
[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11165576/]
The Myspace Problem
[http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/the-myspace-problem]
Hacking a More Tasteful Myspace
[http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/04/hacking-myspace-layouts]
Photos on myspace get family evicted from apartment
[http://www.wftv.com/news/9331012/detail.html]
Police loses job
[http://boston.metro.us/metro/national/ap/BRF_MySpace_Police.html]
Police loses job over myspace
[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13563921/]
Gay man loses church music job over myspace
[http://washingtontimes.com/national/20060602-104732-2890r.htm]