Why I Hate MySpace

Ok, for a long time now, I’ve had this love/hate relationship with MySpace. I love that fact that I know everytime I meet someone there’s a 99.9% chance I can find them on MySpace and keep in touch and such. I HATE the fact that they don’t seem to be able to do ANYTHING right.

Case and Point: Event A: They decided to steal Facebook’s features. I’m fine with this, I mean its not surprising, and at least they’re stealing good great ideas. Event B: They do a terrible job of re-implementing said stolen features. Event C: They end up with an even worse user experience afterwards.
A good example of this is in two distinct and relatively new features. “Friend Status” and “Friend Subscriptions.” Two features that are clearly COMPLETE rip-offs of Facebook’s “Status Updates” and “News Feed.” Again, I’m fine with this, as most of my friends haven’t made the jump to Facebook yet, so I’d love to stay updated on them using these types of features. However, on Facebook, the news feed is compiled automatically and put together for you based on who you talk to most and you can even configure what types of stories and people you’d like to hear more or less about. On MySpace, “Friend Subscriptions” forces you to subscribe to friends one-by-one. And they don’t even put a button on the profile pages to do this. So you’re forced to search through hundreds of pages to find the person you’d like updates on and then click a check box then click save. Then when you view your updates, you see stories about them uploading pictures, videos, etc. You DO NOT see stories such as “Person A posted a comment on Person B’s page.” MySpace could NOT pull off stories like this because their databases and code base are just too convoluted. There’s tons more small problems with this feature, but I’m already rambling. Moving on to “Friend Status.” On Facebook, I can click my “Friends” tab, and see a paged out list of my friends with the most recent status updates at the top. I can also filter, search, etc. (BTW: Facebook’s site layout/organization/feature set/etc is LIGHT YEARS ahead of anything MySpace has ever and most-likely will ever do). Anyways, back to “Friend Status.” I can update my status on my Home Page. Pretty much a direct feature rip from Facebook, but again, I’m fine with it, because its a good feature. However, when I click to “View All” of my friend’s status updates. It shows me ALL of my friends on ONE page. Are you kidding me? As of this post, I have 22,319 friends on MySpace. I know not everyone has this many but most people have at least 500. And listing out 500 users on one page with no apparent order to the list is the web application equivalent of telling someone to go to hell.

I have to digress so I can work on my iPhone MySpace web application, but please, if anyone reading knows anyone at MySpace, tell them to read what I’ve posted here, and feel free to get in touch with me as I have about a million other simple, small fixes that would make the site be a MUCH better place.

Thanks for reading.