So it’s a weird web world in MySpace. I’ve been playing around a bit these past few days (and created an account for me) for a few reasons. The original reason was because a few local bands and bars have “space” but not much else in the way of a presence on-line. Then (of course) I found some people I know and linked to them as friends and so on and it consumes a bit of time pretty quickly.
One of the reasons it consumes time is that most of the pages are awful: they don’t load properly, millions of photos and flash slideshows all on one page and the MySpace servers just don’t seem to keep up. Part of this is a million sites with bad layouts that fall off the side of the page, sparkle too much or have transparent text/body and conflict with the background. But like the psychedelic LSD trip that some of these pages resemble, I keep coming back for more. Maybe that’s the appealing part? I’m not really sure. Maybe it should be called MyLSD…
It’s just amazing how awful so many of the pages are. They don’t even render properly in IE on a Windows machine. It’s very bizarre. Please let me clarify, the original layouts load fine, it’s layouts people change (and comments people add). And while you can disable HTML comments, it still shows the HTML code instead of just ignoring it (you can’t edit other’s comments).
But as I’ve said I’ve managed to get sucked in a few times. Adding more people and bands to my friends list (blogroll) and getting exciting when I see another person has added me (you can’t add someone without their permission and vice-versa). Is it worth the time to add myself to the friend roll of some non-local band like the Indigo Girls or Anna Nalick?
All these people have blogs, but most of them don’t blog (or if they tried it gave up ages ago) so it’s just a weird commenting system. A few neat features: Friend’s can blast out a message to everyone who has them as a friend and it shows up in a window at the bottom of your home page (where you can go to edit your pages and be bombarded with advertisements of bands, TV shows and the hot women advertising true.com) where you can choose to read it or not (it’s kinda like a junk mail box from friends but if the title is inviting you may read it). So for example my local bar sent out a message that said something like “Come up tonight because Daniella, Pam and Jane are working tonight” which is interesting since if I was considering going (or actually hadn’t just come home) and knew three of my favorite staff were working I might have gone up.
Some downsides from a Microsoft technical standpoint: The servers appear to get overloaded often, you can’t always login (“technical difficulties”), they seem to force you to have a blog, whether you post or not, the block HTML but still show the code thing I mentioned earlier, can’t edit comments. Every page has just a generic comment place at the bottom of your page (profile comments) but you can’t comment since you are not a friend of yourself nor can you add yourself (just a little odd).
