MySpace Threatens MyCareer?
02/05/06 03:10 PM
I’m clearly a little late to the party, but I’ve just checked out the monster that is MySpace.
Oh my word.
I don’t know how or why I’d never heard of this before, it certainly seems to be very popular judging by the amount of people there are registered. Maybe I’m just not ‘with it’. Yep, I said ‘with it’, thereby proving how not with it I actually am. Stop it.
I stumbled across MySpace because a friend of mine (Lowman, the writer who has appeared on these very pages) has a profile there. Now, Lowman is a very talented freelance writer who I have told many times to get a website; I’d make him a site for free, no worries, just get his stuff online for people to see. Websites though, are never really ‘free’, are they? It’s only a small fee but there’s usually a domain registration fee and a webspace fee at the very least. So people are going to these straight-out-of-the-box website builders because they do the job they’re needed to do, as simple as that. It’s only partly to do with not paying a fee – not everybody knows or even cares about HTML; why bother when you don’t have to? You can have a web presence in a matter of minutes with no expenditure, monetary or mental!
Is this the way the web is going? Most normal (read: non-IT) people just don’t care if there are adverts on their site (heck; a lot of IT-savvy bloggers even choose to put Google ads on their sites to make maybe $10 a year or whatever. I think it looks crap, personally, but…) or if their URL is whatevertemplate/whateversite, as long as it’s easy to use and remember. Granted there are a lot of terrible templates out there but you can quite easily find a clean, elegant template which would more than suffice. You don’t have to have animated gifs (although looking at some profiles it appears to still be 1998).
I know the likes of Geocities will come and go and the real value of us designers should (hopefully) remain. I’m not doom-mongering here, but there are already site builders that create ‘modern’ XHTML/CSS sites. A lot of developers play around with such things as a hobby but these will just get better and better.
To be honest I don’t quite know what I want to say here, in fact I’m probably talking my way out of some work. Just… something unnerves me about the likes of MySpace…
commenting closed for this article
On Tuesday May 2, 2006,
Steve Tucker said:
Strikingly potent article Stu – myspace scares the crap outta me. Apparently according to my Mrs there is like a big unofficial competition to see who can make the best ‘space’ – her attempt includes (though is not limited to) an animated gif stary background – complete with all the twinkly goodness any stargazer could ever ask for. The real bad thing however is that, while debugging for FireFox, she asked me to help. To my stunned disbelief the code was so bad I could barely read it and do little to assist with the 2 minutes I could give her whilst the kettle boiled. Am I the one and only web developer who finds starting completely from scratch easier than myspace’s “easy to use” administration console? Aggh!
On Wednesday May 3, 2006,
Stu said:
Nope, I?d start from scratch as well!
I?ve not actually gone under the bonnet (hood, whatever) of the MySpace site, who knows, it?s possibly very good. In the wrong hands the results can indeed be like the Geocities sites of 1996, but they don?t have to be. Maybe we should all design our own ?spaces? and do things properly!...?
I guess it?s just obvious that most people don?t care if their space looks crap or not, it?s free!
On Wednesday May 3, 2006,
Steve Tucker said:
Thats a pretty neat idea… a standards complient, css driven MySpace masterpiece. We could even get some bespoke gracefully degrading DOM in there for good measure… prove our worth to the world once more!
On Wednesday May 3, 2006,
Stu said:
Yeah we could even put in ‘trendy’ templates that include one of those banner strips in the top corner and a spiky circle sticker thing. And drop shadows, and, and…
I bet it’s been done though!