MyMess.com

Fresh on the heels of my Mac-fiasco of installing yesterday (they didn't start today because the user is off today - so maybe Monday), I got to thinking about another mess that you can find on the web: It's called MySpace.



If you are unfamiliar with MySpace, then this must be your first time ever on a PC and dealing with the Internet. I understand the principle of why it is so popular. I just never got sucked in. I've been there...I've even created a profile...but there's a major flaw, which I think can coincide with the problem of personal web sites, and that is: there are no rules on what you can put on your site. What makes MySpace worse, though, is they make it easy to add content. And most web pages look like roadkill after their 'owners' start putting things on it they think are cool.



MP3's that automatically play! This is a pet peeve with me. I like to surf the web listening to my own tunes, but when you go to a person's MySpace page and are automatically blasted with their favorite song they put up, I get annoyed. And I'm not going to turn off my sound because there are legitimate sounds I want to hear.



The never ending page is another part of the mess. Some pages just go on for several screen lengths, and it's all because of 100 comments from people with really large avatars or added pictures, or they've just added every type of information window they can. Enough already. Keep it short and sweet, and put a link to comments or content that's old.



Wallpapers? Sure! Let's allow people to throw up any picture they want to be tiled over the entire page (and it's there a LOT if the have the above problem of tons of stuff added to the page - 'Let's look at Brittany Spears tiled for 6 screens!'). It makes reading stuff great fun when the words overlap like colors on the page. It's kind of like solving a Wheel of Fortune puzzle. I think that's and 'A', Alex.



And finally, there's the wonky add-ins that are so poorly written that they either conflict with something else making your browser act erratically, or they simply don't work at all. It might have been cool when Johnny Q. High-Schooler saw it on that Warez web site, but he didn't realize it was really written with code leakier than the Titanic. Hey...what's that? A virus attached to that applet? Great....



Throw all of this together into a blender, make the majority of your users under the age of 18, and you have web sites that are mostly headache inducing, if not dangerous to computer operation. It's like giving a five year old a pneumatic nail gun. There's a chance they might make something useful, but you pretty much expect the worst.