Sunday, September 10, 2006

myspace = the internet circa 1998

When or where else did everyone use such horrific design on their personal websites. I'm surprised though that people don't use the old standby <blink></blink>.

Also, why am I so grumpy?

7 comments:

Joel said...

Oh man. the best succinct description i've heard of myspace ever. also in honor of you i used blinky text on my blog today.

Anonymous said...

Couldn't agree more. This is a pretty typical problem when technology becomes consumable for the mainstream. Another example is the plethora of really awful remixes that have been floating around on the internet since ProTools LE, Garageband, Logic, etc. came out. Cheap technology doesn't make you an expert. On the plus side, that's good news for people who actually know how to make websites, write music, and understand good graphic design.

monsterpants said...

yeah, myspace is clearly designed with the purpose of being for the popular masses. pop culture is "popular" because more people access it, influence it, use it, consume it, demand it, etc. the more people you have doing all that to a thing (like a type of website) the more "ho-hum" or "average" it will be because it is spread out over so many more people than if it were just two geniuses, like gary and brian, making a website for their own personal use.

what i'm saying is, the less personal and the more popular something becomes, the less influenced by genius and smarts it is likely to be because, on average, society is pretty "blah."

does this make any sense?

also- yeah, why are you so grumpy? ;)
but i like you anyways.

Joel said...

I think the problem is less the accessibility of technology than the fact that MySpace is set up in a crappy way to begin with. It seems like most of us are down with a mass-accessible program not too different from MySpace (i.e., Blogger), and I think the reason Ilike it more than MySpace is that it looks nicer, there are no ads, and it doesn't limit what I can do...it seamlessly integrates with the rest of the internet. What MySpace does is, it seem to me, is take all the cool stuff you can do with the internet (like emailing people, posting pictures, listening to music, etc) and limits them -- makes them harder to do, and allows you to do less of them, and plasters ads all over them.

I guess that's my beef.

I could totally go for some beef.

Joel said...

I shouldn't say that Blogger doesn't limit what I can do -- of course it does...but less so than MySpace, I think.

Gary said...

I think Joel is onto something. Another blogger I read was talking about how myspace plans to add video capabilities so that people don't have to go use youtube to post videos to myspace. Chances are, they will implement it much more poorly than youtube, and they will make it more difficult for users to embed youtube videos (I believe they did restrict them once upon a time).

I think the idea of myspace is interesting. The implementation sucks though.

Anonymous said...

Good points Joel, Gwen and Gary.

Usually the result of really bad looking myspace pages comes from users customizing it in ways that violate good design standards. For example, my MySpace page (http://www.myspace.com/owenbrian) uses no customization, and as generic as it is, it's easy to read and navigate, which is more than I can say for most pages. I don't see much customization in blogger, which may be why it tends to look nicer. Perhaps someone with more experience in blogger could elaborate?