MySpace

Popular website. Apparently the sixth most popular in the world according to Alexa. And they'd know.

A friend of mine has just started with her MySpace site and says shes totally addicted. It's a neat enough idea. You make your site, link to all your friends sites, put all kinds on information about yourself like which schools you went to and where you work, then other people find you through the information you have entered. Old school friends, people that like the music you like...

To me, MySpace sites all looks a little.. well... messy, amateur, confusing. Advertising by Google is there at the top of every page and that really detracts from the look. There is bugger-all in the way of customization tools built in and the tools that are there are far from user-friendly.

However, being so popular, there are a lot of places that make tools and templates for MySpace. Googling "MySpace Layouts" will return close to six million hits! So while MySpace is lean on tools, there is a plethora of stuff made for it by people from all over the net, but, due to the terms of service for MySpace, none of them are allowed to remove the advertising so every site still looks amateur at best.

Anyhoo, this friend of mine who recently became addicted wanted to add a music clip to her site and was having trouble so I went and made a MySpace account to see if i could do it myself and then tell her how I did it.

Here is my site. I feel dirty. It was awful. They tools for constructing your site are appalling. There's that damn ad banner at the top too - I hate that. And I got spammed three times in the first couple of hours of opening the site. To be fair, the spam filters and abuse reporting tools are pretty good.

I made a widget from Widgetbox that shows this blog on that site. Points go to Widgetbox, not MySpace for that one. Also, I picked up - after many hours of searching - a half-decent MySpace layout from Iron Spider.

I've yet to add music and quite frankly, have lost interest. I don't expect to do much more with the site, its too cumbersome and has a real teenager feel to it that I just don't like. I reckon this is where Microsoft got the idea for their Live Spaces site - they never have their own ideas after all. MySpace is owned by Fox Interactive Media, which is owned by NewsCorp, which is headed by Rupert Murdoch so it's probably just as evil as Microsoft anyway. I think I will stick with Google and Blogger for some time to come yet. It's just better.

Don't be evil.