Stop Bashing Myspace

Unfortunately there are many crude images most often posted by teens under the age of 16 (who just fake their age). MySpace is too large to be policed and there is a lot of smut to be found which is why it has become a breeding ground for sexual predators as of lately.

However it's not just MySpaces fault; parents need to monitor what their kids are doing and I'm sure if most parents saw their childrens MySpace account there would be less potentially dangerous material out there. Too many kids, most in high school, post schedules, cell phone numbers and addresses; information which is far too critical but to them they don't see a problem.

MySpace is great and for bands and such but it has a long way to go before it'll gain any of my trust as a social networking platform.

My biggest complaint is the poor design; ColdFusion is absolutely horrible and their solution hasn't scaled well to millions of people and their advertising is out of control. Not to mention the horrible web design on every single user page.

its because myspace is designed as a "friend-scape" catering towards the interest of adolescents and young adults. Ever since its debut, Myspace became a way for a Middle schooler or even elementary school kid to show how "grown-up" they are. My 11 yr old brother has had his myspace for several months and many of his friends have them as well. He even stated a "pimp my myspace" service because he is pretty damn good with html. the ability to create whatever you want and post it on to a public arena is something younger children have not ever discovered before and myspace gives them the opportunity to do whatever they want. soon threafter, the proffanity shows up as well as the dirty music videos, icons, and pictuers. The children arent very good with keeping theitr secret pages from their parent s and immediately theyre exposed to the parents who discover a vast network of young adults in their basic forms of life connected to their child in the web. Its becoming a problem because the parents in turn chastise myspace iand its mature users for converting ththier child when really it is the fault of the parent for allowing the child to explore the web and find the opportunity to post wehatever. it is the parents fault for making the kids want to possess the "grown up" attitude when really kids and adults hold seperate spheres. There were always friend site sthat were never as popular of myspace but becaus eof its poularity, everyone has a myspace and that trend is evident to children.

myspace is not something i like. I hear it daily, "look me up on my space(insert name here)"
the site is full of people who know nothing about HTML.. reminds me of 1995 in there... midi music and bad colors etc.. animated gifs etc. It's like one big IRC chat room with websites.
all personal opinions, but that's my take on it.

The criticism for myspace, I think, comes from the fact that it is aimed at teens, and yet there is little effort to actually protect them. There is no serious age verification (by the way, the limit is 14, not 16, according to their Safety Tips page). Also, they have a private profile feature, but they only intend it for the youngest members and don't enable it by default. Apparently they don't even allow this for members over 15 (according to someone I know who has a myspace account; I could not verify this).

Social networking sites are a great way to connect with people and meet new friends, but most sites have learned by now that they need to have some level of trust built into the system. Sites like Orkut and Facebook do this by allowing you to limit your profile to only friends, friends of friends, or people who have some mutually-verified connection. This is enabled by default at those sites. Facebook has found a great system to allow people to meet in a relatively safe way. In order to get an account, you have to have an email address from a university they support, and by default your profile is only visible to other people at that school.

Myspace has no such restrictions. It is completely unrestricted by default. That is a magnet for abuse. You can't blame myspace for everything, but they do deserve some of the blame. They have done very little to protect children or even encourage safe practices.

Why do I hate Myspace? Even Carson Daley has a myspace page and promotes it nonstop. I don't want to be anywhere Carson Daley is. He is nothing but a poser and myspace is full of posers

begin rant--

OK, I just wish myspace users would understand that when someone goes to a website and is immediately blasted with music, they quickly learn to hate that website. If you would like to define yourself with a pop radio song by the band of the week, turn it off by default.

Furthermore, myspace is possibly the ugliest collection of pages on the entire Internet. People, if you have to press your face against your screen to read a profile where the body text is close to the same color as your horribly busy tiling background, that's not good.

--end rant.

I couldn't find anything better to say on top of Dreamweavr72 and robK, so for what its worth, just bumped their comments. I wish I could bump multiple times...

I wrote a post about the ugliness of myspace (and the privacy issues) a while back. In short, I think the ugliness is a feature, not a bug. We're not the intended audience. The intended audience is teens who think that stuff is "cool". The flashier the better. It's more of a "look what I can do" mentality than "look how nice my page looks".

I can't stand it either, but like I said it's not for us.

Fantastic for networking? I disagree with that... It may be good for communication, but so is email... or at least when everyone had it.

I don't see how MySpace is great at anything it does. It has second-rate EVERYTHING when it comes to a social network... except for volume of users.

Look at it's blog implementation, or it's search, or it's mail. It becomes obvious that the goal is to sell more and more ad space and the reason to add these lousy half-assed features is to compete with other social networks.

On other social networks, the ultimate goal is to give something you want more publicity, not just hooking up with friends. See LiveJournal. LiveJournal allows you to publish content and have it seen by a wider audience through it's friends aggregation. Or how Flickr allows you to show off your photography. Or how del.icio.us or ma.gnolia allow you to share links.

All myspace allows you to do is show off / promote yourself. Do we really need that? I think that is hurting the kids on a much wider scale than the danger exposed by a few crimes that have recently been publicized (which would probably have happened regardless of myspace).

Just my $.02

myspace is not something i like. I hear it daily, "look me up on my space(insert name here)"
the site is full of people who know nothing about HTML.. reminds me of 1995 in there... midi music and bad colors etc.. animated gifs etc. It's like one big IRC chat room with websites. all personal opinions, but that's my take on it.

I just got a myspace on tuesday, and I have never told anyone to "look me up". Anyways, insert_name_here was already taken. ;-)

It is horribly ugly and not at all Firefox or OPera compatible. One page crashed firefox repeatedly (not some user's page, the page of System of a Down) and in Opera played 4 songs at once, only 2 of which could be paused. The uglyness (ugliness?) of the site is so pervasive, the front page is ugly too. Not to mention that it is owned by News Corp/Rupert Murdoch, and it censors you.

clarification: It censors you by deleting any html/css that blocks the ads, and replaces it with "DONOTBLOCKOURADSDONOTBLOCKOURADS" If you try to type that in a profile or blog, it gets deleted. I got around it by putting in [/i] in the middle (obviously iwht angle braces, not square braces)

You're also forgetting just how alful it looks, and how slow it is.

I started on MySpace and moved to Blogger. this is far better, but still lacks a lot of features and functionality. If you know what you're doing, i made a grewat decision in switching to the wordpress content management system. since then i've never looked back. It's simple to modify and add to. I've not a bad word for it.

Friends,

Most of the "concern" is generated and publicized by MySpace COMPETITORS.

Welcome to cutthroat capitalism.

Cordially,

Jer

I think we need a Web 2.0 social networking application. Much nicer than MySpace, and with the ability for people to police the site themselves, reporting profiles and photographs that are unsavoury. Just my opinion anyway, I think it'd make a great site.

I hate myspace, but I keep a profile just for communication and because most of my friends wouldn't know how else to make a webpage. It is terrible in its design, but, as the author said, it's useful for networking. If there were a better, cleaner, and smarter service, I would switch immediately. Making your own blog is nice, but it does not get the same attention as the pages of the people in your "top 8."

insert_name_here already mentioned it, but I personally believe a lot of the latest scrutiny is because of Rupert Murdoch's recent ownership. The fact that the site renders slowly and has a tendency to break is just more incentive, in my opinion.

I'm not against the concept of myspace but I'm all for more direct competition if it meant a stronger product. But the numbers don't lie, people do love myspace. So the bashing you are hearing? Give me a break.

I posted a seed about a myspace incident: here

Charis,

bbboc

i hate myspace because at least 25% of bandwith useage is myspace links to stuff on my server without linking to the blog ( pictures / videos ..etc )

Ok Ok from a design stand pont MySpace most undoubtfully sucks. From a developer standpoint its a complete laughing stock. And you don't even have to look at the source code to see this. In the profile editor on MySpace it reads: "You may enter HTML/DHTML or CSS in any text field. JavaScript is not allowed." Sure this may not mean much to most people, but from a developer standpoint there's a minor point I'd like to make. Apparently DHTML is allowed but JavaScript isn't. How is this possible? That's like saying you can click around on this site but you can't use a mouse. Geez this hurts my brain to think such idiots are running such an unfortunately popular site. I know this post is about not bashing MySpace but come on, there is utter stupidity written all over this site and not even by the users!

Your topic, "Stop bashing Myspace", is any oxymoron. I can connect you to 100 people who think Myspace is garbage (most over 18) and only a few that think its "JUST GREAT!!!!!"(most of which are 14). Everyone has their own likes, and thats fine, but dont tell me to stop bashing Myspace because YOU like it. I dont, and will continue my Godzilla stomping of your Myspace city :)

insert_name_here:

Exactly! However you should try it with Safari on a Mac. All of those stupid videos in Windows Media format. I've gone to pages that never even loaded, they simply crashed the program.

I didn't know there was censorship going on. I understand the replacement of ad-blocking code, but anything else isn't right.

My new media class took a close look at myspace a year and a half ago. My first impression was that it is addictive, looking at all the profiles of how people represent themselves in the myspace context. I used to advocate it, all fun and games.... Most of my friends were haters. Now they all have accounts and they are hooked: "why are you never on anymore, loser" they comment on my page.
It is always cool though when I sign on every once and a while and 5 or 6 people from long ago have found me. "sure, i will be your virtual friend, WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO??" BLAH BLAH..

Here is the scary thing: Murdoch (if you don't know about this guy you should look into it) bought it about a year ago. smart move on his part, access to information on everyone with an acct. (some very personal information actually) from a marketing standpoint access to all that information is priceless. And it is not in Murdoch's interests to protect anyone's "rights"; he just wants that $$$ cha-ching, the guy would sell his own mother.

Ironic that the author uses myspace to expand a democrats' group. Rupert is arguably the most powerful neo-con in all media/ Reagan is his hero. All that democratic networking information is invaluable to his empire. Tell him what's on your mind.

Keep in mind it was not aimed at teens. They simply came into the site and took it over. Its original purpose was a way for unsigned band to have a place to promote themselves. In any case if the site was Joe's place of wax.com and it had the same content we would be hearing the same song and dance about it too.

Myspace is getting so much bad press lately because it's so popular compared to any other social networking site. I don't like it for it's horrible design/technical problems, but there really is no other alternative at this time. Also if you've read any of the history behind how it came about it's kind of scary, especially now the Rupert Murdoch has gotten his hands on it. Myspace is the perfect marketing device for teens now.