Myspace

Myspace is the one place on the web where poor web design meets with a collective lack of aesthetic sensibility and poor taste in music.

Putting a colorful image as your background, and making all the layout tables transparent is an awesome idea. It’s not like anyone ever reads the comments or your silly “About Me” section anyway. I always said that nothing makes a girl look more sexy than 37 animated glitter gifs scattered through her profile.

Don’t forget to tYpE iN MiXeD CaPs! All the cool kids are doing it.

Also, please pick the most obnoxious song to play in the background. Everyone knows that the best possible way to express yourself is to blast the same song as 10000 other myspace users. It really underlines your individuality, and shows that you are a nonconformist free spirit.

XKCD Comic: Myspace
comic © xkcd

Myspace is the new Geocities.

It would be so easy to turn this around though.

  1. Strip all HTML tags other than a and maybe img (they already strip script and iframe tags)
  2. force click-to-play on all the embedded songs
  3. auto size posted images (so the layout is not broken when someone posts a wide image)
  4. run a script that will strip style tags from all existing profiles

This would be 5-10 lines of code, and usability of the site would go up some odd 60% or more. Sure, users would cry that you b0rked their awesome profile theme. It’s not like they are gonna quit. Not if all their friends still use the site.

One semi-cluefull web developer could fix myspace in 2-3 hours. How come this has not been done yet? Why does myspace allow users to screw around with the css? Don’t they realize that allot of people remove their banner ads this way?

[tags]myspace, web design, ugly, bad design, geocities[/tags]

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16 Responses to Myspace

  1. ZeWrestler UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    thank you for giving more reasons to not join the mindless masses on that site. i shall continue my boycott of myspace….until some really really cute girl forces me to get an account. lol.

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  2. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    Btw, isn’t this amazing how some of the most popular sites on the internet have downright ugly, horrible design? Myspace, craigslist, pre-css slashdot…

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  3. ZeWrestler UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    only on the internet

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  4. It seems that MySpace is the truck of which Ted Stevens spoke. Everyone just dumps their crap on it.

    MySpace is teh suck. I signed up for an account years ago because some friends were on it and killed my account shortly thereafter. Having pictures of half naked strangers on my site offends my sensibilities. At least give me a mechanism to turn it off. Really, MySpace is cheap pr0n for teenagers… it’s disgusting.

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  5. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Nah… I’m sure the teenagers can figure out how to get real pr0n for free. After all, the internet is for pr0n.

    Btw, I love how everyone has that “I’m so wasted/high I can barely stand” picture in their profile. Especially since more and more employers start to look at Myspace before hiring potential employees out of college.

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  6. Ummm, you’ll forgive me for not clicking on that link ;-)

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  7. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    LOL! There is no porn at that link – just that youtube video with WoW characters, and that catchy song. You know which one it is :) I posted about it before.

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  8. mot UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    hey man i know you don’t like myspace (you may do ) i have myspace music page can you tell me how increase myspace music play ? how the player works ?

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  9. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    [quote comment=”4362″]hey man i know you don’t like myspace (you may do ) i have myspace music page can you tell me how increase myspace music play ? how the player works ?[/quote]

    Do what now? I’m not sure what do you mean.

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  10. mot UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    i have a myspace music page, how can i increase the music cuonter,
    if you go to any my space music profile youll see a m3 player, and there is the # that show how many time their music been played,
    per day and song and there is the # on left that show the total play, is there any way to increase that number ?
    thanks

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  11. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    Oh, that. Hmm… No clue how to do that. Also, it probably might be against MySpace TOS.

    Sorry.

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  12. mot UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    i don’t think its a against myspace because there are some people that done that! man there is lots of money here think about it .

    check this out http://www.getmyspaceplays.com/legal.php

    they make looooootsss of money man , i wish i could right scrip

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  13. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    I assume the people you linked to use some simple script and some proxies to create fake plays. It looks like click fraud to me – but even if it’s not it is still kinda lame.

    Sorry but I can’t help you with this. I’ll be honest – it just doesn’t seem right to me. And the fact that other people are doing it, doesn’t make it any less wrong.

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  14. mot UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    i don’t think its iligal,
    can you tell me how myspace music player works ? i copy the HTml from music player and past them to my websit, I search for refreshing script and i found one to refresh the page every 10 min, works fine but but my music player counter is not moving up, may be because i refresh the page in same ip address ?

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  15. Luke UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows says:

    No, it’s not illegal. It doesn’t make it right. ;)

    The player is a flash object – I don’t think you will be able to mess with it’s code. Btw, do you know what Myspace considers a “play”? They might be incrementing that counter only if someone listens to the whole song from the beginning to the end. I don’t know how they calculate it – and I’m to lazy to search for it. It’s something you will have to figure out yourself.

    Second, I’m assuming that they only count 1 consecutive play from a given IP per day or something like that. Again, this is something that you would have to verify yourself. It’s probably in their documentation somewhere.

    I’m assuming that a perl script using the WWW-Mechanize module would do the job. Have your script cycle through a list of free proxies (here is how), connect to the page, and download the flash object. That might do the trick – or not. Once again – it depends how they count plays.

    You can get perl for windows from ActiveState.

    You may need to figure out a way to actually play the song all the way through. Not sure if you can do that from perl. But you might be able to write a macro which would make your computer open a browser, set a proxy, navigate to your MySpace and play the song with AutoHotKey. Or at least it seems like you could.

    That’s all the help I can give you. I will not write the scripts for you because what you are trying to do is against my principles. Also, I don’t have time or resources to teach you how to write them.

    And a word of warning – make absolutely sure that this is not against their terms of service. Saying “I don’t think it is because other people seem to do it” just doesn’t cut it. They will delete your account in a heartbeat if they catch you doing something that is explicitly forbidden in their TOS. Read their whole user agreement and terms of service for music pages before you do anything.

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  16. mot UNITED STATES Internet Explorer Windows says:

    thank u so much for info, i wish i could use it, i just don’t know how to write a script, thats the key to it, i do any thing if you help me

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