myspace (4 Viewers)
- Thread starter Badass J Elkann
- Start date
myspace is an abomination. A plethora of fantastically badly designed, unbrowsable and completely worthless pages by people who have no business making websites until they take a crash course in html&css. What it does is bring back the standards for personal websites that were current in 1995 and a complete free-for-all exercise in making the ugliest possible "space".
:tongue:
:tongue:
Here's a great article about creating a myspace profile from wired.com
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MySpace Avoidance Fails Miserably
By Lore Sjöberg| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Oct, 18, 2006
My attempts to ignore MySpace have failed. It's clearly not going away, at least until something even more annoying comes along, so I'm taking the plunge, and setting up a MySpace page. I'm writing about the experience, partially because it may provide insight into the Zeitgeist of the contemporary web, but mostly so I can say at least I got paid to do it.
In signing up, I give my actual birth date, which is already a faux pas. I'm not clear on the details, but I understand that on MySpace, no matter your actual age, you generally say you're 14.
Next step: Upload a photo. Unfortunately these can't include nudity or violent or offensive material, and that pretty much covers all the photos I have of myself, so I substituted a picture of an antique mechanical alcoholic.
Step Three: Invite your friends to join MySpace. Seriously. I haven't even seen my own page yet, and already they're hassling me to shill for them. This is like going to a restaurant where the waiter brings you a glass of water and a basket of rolls, then hands you the phone and asks you to call your friends and tell them how great the food is. I pass.
Clicking through, I find I already have a friend named Tom. He works for MySpace and he's willing to answer questions as long as I've read the FAQ first. I can't say that I know what makes someone a true friend, but I'd say one of the major qualifications is that they're willing to answer questions without making you read a FAQ.
I start filling out my profile. The first box in the Interests and Personality section -- and I have to say I wasn't aware MySpace users made a distinction between the two -- is Headline. I'm not sure what story I'm headlining here. The story of me, I guess, but "Bored Swede Dabbles in Online Community" doesn't really sing, you know? So I go with "Tsunami Sweeps Omaha: Thousands Feared Damp." That's news you can use.
I fill out the About Me section, attempting -- as all people who fill out About Me sections do -- to make my life sound more interesting than it is. I can't relate the whole thing here, but it involves sunspots and goblin kings.
The next section is for me to explain whom I'd like to meet. If I wanted to meet people, I wouldn't be sitting on my ass filling out a MySpace profile. So I skip that and move on to Interests. Exhaustive lists of interests are a major feature of MySpace pages, which is odd because very few of them include "reading other people's exhaustive lists of interests." I put down a few of my passions (cabin fever, eyeglass wipes, people and animals named "Esmerelda"...) and move on to the trial by fire: musical interests.
Frankly, I can't afford to list anything. You know the part in The Hobbit where Smaug the dragon accidentally reveals a vulnerable patch on his chest and subsequently gets shot down like a fire-breathing partridge? Revealing your favorite bands is kind of like that, only not incredibly nerdy. If in the midst of an otherwise impeccable music list you reveal that you liked Ace of Base's second album, the one that wasn't popular enough to appreciate ironically, then you're toast. After that you'll be lucky if your friends list still includes Tom.
So I make everything up. Hopefully people will think bands like "Boys Without Tears" and "The Munchausen by Proxy All-Stars" are so incredibly great that nobody listens to them.
Finally, I take a look at what I've created. The main feature is a flashing ad banner that would send a Pokémon into an epileptic fit. I've seen a lot of ugly ads, but this is the ugliest I've encountered. It may be the ugliest possible.
There's something missing from my MySpace page, though. It's ugly, sure, but it's only ugly in the same way as any default MySpace page. If I want to be a part of the MySpace hive mind, I need to upgrade to truly unreadable. Next week we'll take a look at the garish fruits of my efforts.
---
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a name-dropper, a beat-dropper and an eyedropper.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71960-0.html?tw=wn_index_14
===
MySpace Avoidance Fails Miserably
By Lore Sjöberg| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Oct, 18, 2006
My attempts to ignore MySpace have failed. It's clearly not going away, at least until something even more annoying comes along, so I'm taking the plunge, and setting up a MySpace page. I'm writing about the experience, partially because it may provide insight into the Zeitgeist of the contemporary web, but mostly so I can say at least I got paid to do it.
In signing up, I give my actual birth date, which is already a faux pas. I'm not clear on the details, but I understand that on MySpace, no matter your actual age, you generally say you're 14.
Next step: Upload a photo. Unfortunately these can't include nudity or violent or offensive material, and that pretty much covers all the photos I have of myself, so I substituted a picture of an antique mechanical alcoholic.
Step Three: Invite your friends to join MySpace. Seriously. I haven't even seen my own page yet, and already they're hassling me to shill for them. This is like going to a restaurant where the waiter brings you a glass of water and a basket of rolls, then hands you the phone and asks you to call your friends and tell them how great the food is. I pass.
Clicking through, I find I already have a friend named Tom. He works for MySpace and he's willing to answer questions as long as I've read the FAQ first. I can't say that I know what makes someone a true friend, but I'd say one of the major qualifications is that they're willing to answer questions without making you read a FAQ.
I start filling out my profile. The first box in the Interests and Personality section -- and I have to say I wasn't aware MySpace users made a distinction between the two -- is Headline. I'm not sure what story I'm headlining here. The story of me, I guess, but "Bored Swede Dabbles in Online Community" doesn't really sing, you know? So I go with "Tsunami Sweeps Omaha: Thousands Feared Damp." That's news you can use.
I fill out the About Me section, attempting -- as all people who fill out About Me sections do -- to make my life sound more interesting than it is. I can't relate the whole thing here, but it involves sunspots and goblin kings.
The next section is for me to explain whom I'd like to meet. If I wanted to meet people, I wouldn't be sitting on my ass filling out a MySpace profile. So I skip that and move on to Interests. Exhaustive lists of interests are a major feature of MySpace pages, which is odd because very few of them include "reading other people's exhaustive lists of interests." I put down a few of my passions (cabin fever, eyeglass wipes, people and animals named "Esmerelda"...) and move on to the trial by fire: musical interests.
Frankly, I can't afford to list anything. You know the part in The Hobbit where Smaug the dragon accidentally reveals a vulnerable patch on his chest and subsequently gets shot down like a fire-breathing partridge? Revealing your favorite bands is kind of like that, only not incredibly nerdy. If in the midst of an otherwise impeccable music list you reveal that you liked Ace of Base's second album, the one that wasn't popular enough to appreciate ironically, then you're toast. After that you'll be lucky if your friends list still includes Tom.
So I make everything up. Hopefully people will think bands like "Boys Without Tears" and "The Munchausen by Proxy All-Stars" are so incredibly great that nobody listens to them.
Finally, I take a look at what I've created. The main feature is a flashing ad banner that would send a Pokémon into an epileptic fit. I've seen a lot of ugly ads, but this is the ugliest I've encountered. It may be the ugliest possible.
There's something missing from my MySpace page, though. It's ugly, sure, but it's only ugly in the same way as any default MySpace page. If I want to be a part of the MySpace hive mind, I need to upgrade to truly unreadable. Next week we'll take a look at the garish fruits of my efforts.
---
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a name-dropper, a beat-dropper and an eyedropper.
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71960-0.html?tw=wn_index_14