reasonable aesthetic judgment
Weblogsky points to yet another post suggesting that MySpace’s ugly design is, in fact, responsible for its success. This time, Joshua Porter of Bokardo.com argues that the ease-of-use of MySpace is responsible for attracting hordes of users. I find this a little hard to swallow. Lately, I’ve been really frustrated with MySpace’s habit of hiding functionality. For example, the page that aggregates blog subscriptions is more or less hidden, unless someone has posted a new entry since the last time I checked the site. When a blog is updated, I get a “new blog subscription posts” message on my “home” page, which links to the blog aggregator, but I am otherwise unable to drill through and find this page. (MySpace has URIs that are difficult to decipher, so remembering the URI is out of the question.) A different, but equally annoying problem lies in posting bulletins. If I want to post a bulletin, the link to the posting page is not by “My Bulletin Space,” where I would expect it, but in a table for “My Mail.” If bulletins and mail are in different tables, then the bulletin link should be with the bulletins. Beyond these frustrating design choices, there is a vast amount of useless clutter on the MySpace home page. I really don’t care about uncool “Cool New People,” alerts on Helio, or importing my address book after I’ve done it. There are a variety of useful Greasemonkey scripts for fixing the design flaws on MySpace, but the nice folks at News Corp. should be addressing these as well.
I still contend that MySpace’s liberal policy toward overriding stylesheets and embedding media is the factor most responsible for its success.
MySpace media hysteria seems to be hitting its peak. I saw a hideous segment on CNN the other night that built on fears about child predators on the social networking site. I can understand why parents might be afraid about their children’s safety online, but how is this any different than the dangers of children using AOL and is this really the most interesting story to tell about the wildly popular site? The piece shared a few anecdotes about runaways and abuse victims using the site, then pulled in a clip of Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet and American Life project speaking about MySpace at a conference. In the clip she says:
These sites are incredibly important to teenagers. I heard a teenage boy who was otherwise relatively standoffish talk with a fervor about how the best part of his day was logging into his MySpace page and seeing if someone had commented him or had friended him.
In text, this seems like a relatively harmless description of how teens use MySpace, but the “predator” story angle combined with Lenhart’s histrionic performance make it seem that teens are helplessly drawn into the project. Although I hardly want to side with News Corp., the news media is being irresponsible about their reporting on MySpace and online activity in general, boiling everything down to child abuse and business reporting.
