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September 4, 2005
MySpace
geekage
I've been infested by the MySpace bug. It's quite amazing how well the site's been able to permeate real life; it seems that all my peers have either already been assimilated or are being nagged to get with the program.
Although the site seems a bit unprofessional both at times (such as when you set your url; the two confirmation popups are rather oddly written), it does provide a useful service; that of interfacing the real world, the online world, and the world of your mind.
The layouts which it uses for the user pages aren't entirely pleasant, however. The rest of the pages serve their purpose quite well, but the user pages give off the impression of being overly stuffed with links and information. The MySpace URL box, for instance, seems completely useless since the url should, indeed, be in your address bar already. And even if this address had to be included, it seems that a better place for it would be in a well-hidden link, perhaps on the user's name.
The "Contact" box just above the URL box also annoys me; it provides a great number of options and the images it uses prop the left hand bar open. It seems there must be a more elegant way of designing it; perhaps move it to the right hand column, which is wider, or maybe put the options (or most of them) in some sort of DHTML-ish menu.
While I'm complaining about the left hand column, the information to the right of the user's picture could be streamlined as well; to start with there are too many line breaks. The state could be pushed up against the user's sex/age, making the list of info look less randomly placed. Perhaps, however, the extraneous line breaks are eliminated if you specify all the information which MySpace asks you for. If this is the case, the code simply needs to be more adaptive. This need for adaptiveness is also shown with the odd placement of BOTH the "Online Now!" icon AND the last login date. If the user's online, I think we realize that they must have last logged in not too long ago. The login date just clutters the interface.
Moving on to the right hand column, the box which indicates that the user is in your extended network seems a bit too prominent. Sure, it's important, but I don't think it's quite that important. I think it might look better if they toned down the box's spacing a bit, removed the border, and maybe underlined the text somehow to make it stand out a bit. As it is, however, it uses up too much of the all-important screen real estate.
The blog links also annoy me. They look perfectly fine when the user has a blog (although they might do with their own header, like the rest of the sections in the right column) but they shouldn't be displayed at all if the user doesn't have a blog.
The blurbs and comments sections look nice, but the friends section is a bit annoying; I think the "View All Friends" link might be integrated with the text which displays the number of the user's friends, much like the comments section does. This seems to point out another overarching flaw in the website; it isn't completely consistent. Two sections, back to back, have text and links which preform the exact same function and yet each is written in a slightly different way!
In conclusion, MySpace provides an excellent service and appears to have become a remarkable success, melding the world of reality with cyberspace. However, the user pages which are so important to the site are not exactly the shining lights of elegance. But oh well; It's time to break out CSS, Javascript, Greasemonkey, and Platypus I suppose. And hey, they have "Agnostic" as an option for the religion field; how can I resist that?
Posted by Trevor Savage at September 4, 2005 12:15 AM