www.maestrosync.com

My two major issues with MySpace, ignoring the issue of the people who actually use it:

First, it is letting users with no skill or clue customise the appearance of their MySpace page without any real restrictions, which almost invariably will look god-awful, will sometimes be completely unusable, and on rare occasions can cause actual damage. Letting people customise their personal pages is all well and good, but:

• they shouldn’t be able to customise the raw code in such a way that allows malicious use,
• there should be an option for viewers to see the page in its default style without all the customisation, and, most importantly,
• they shouldn’t be able to customise the appearance of the main header and footer of the website. Really, why do users have that ability? It’s ridiculous.

Secondly, and I believe more importantly, the design of the site itself is dreadful. When I say design, I don’t just mean how it looks; I mean how it is actually laid out, in terms of usability. Right from the start, there’s no obvious login link that’s universal to the site–you have to go to the main homepage first and use the form there. In fact, having a coherent, universal design is something MySpace really struggles with. For example, reading a blog looks totally different to viewing a profile which looks totally different to viewing a group which looks totally different to MySpace Music (Speaking of which, what is MySpace? There’s certainly no clearly defined identity or even a vague one; even the internal capitalisation varies).

It’s obvious that MySpace is full of different bits and pieces just tacked onto each other, rather than being properly planned from the beginning (at least, I hope that’s the case, and it wasn’t actually planned to be like this). When viewing someone’s comments, you have to click a link to add a new one, rather than just having a quick form right beneath all the existing ones. There’s a great big search bar on the header, but by default that doesn’t search MySpace; no, it searches the web. Who would even use that? And all these issues arise from just a cursory viewing of the site.

If you try to create and customise a profile for yourself (or a fictitious alter-ego), it is incredibly difficult to work out what the hell does what. I’m actually surprised at how many people manage to work out how to customise their profile. The whole thing is just a catastrophe, albeit a ridiculously popular one.

Maybe I’ve been spoilt by community-type websites that actually look good and work well, like Last.fm, but there’s really no excuse for MySpace being so bad.

July 2008 update: MySpace has been updated and it does suck less; visually (outside of users’ editing), things are more uniform. Still, I’m not going to be happy until they provide an option to view profiles without customised styles.