Slashdot Mirror
A New Search for MySpace
garzpacho writes "Businessweek is reporting on MySpace's new strategy. They're going to pit the large engines against each other in a bidding war to provide the popular social networking site with a new search engine. From the article: 'Search is a driver of traffic and advertising revenue for other major Web destinations, but it's a largely untapped source of growth for MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media properties such as online gaming site IGN and sports site Scout. Given MySpace's power, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are expected to compete fiercely for the right to be the search engine of choice for MySpace and the rest of Fox Interactive. News Corp. won't say how much money it expects to derive from a deal, but industry experts say it could conceivably boost MySpace's annual revenue several times over.'"
Although there are millions of active users on Myspace, most are teenagers with little buying power, that are therefore less likely to click on the adverts that gain the search engines revenue. Also, most searches will be for "html help" or "free layouts", not very lucrative markets.
Free Myspace / general CGI Proxy
Some advertisers are reluctant to be associated with the freewheeling site, which has concerned some as a potential hunting ground for sexual predators
Perhaps this will discourage some search engines from working with mySpace as well?
Better stay away from the shopping malls too.
MySpace is no different from anywhere else that teens hang out with minimal supervision. If you are worried that Max Cady might be out there in the shadows, teach your daughters not to be stupid about sex. The "real world" outside is vastly more dangerous for children than any social web network.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I don't know about you, but I think that if they're trying to get major search engines – especially Google – to index MySpace, then that's definitely a good reason to avoid those sites (if you don't already). It's already trivially easy to find all sorts of information on those sites, because so many people just post sensitive personal information without realizing the danger they're putting themselves into; by combining MySpace's information with Google's search technology – or whoever wins – they'd basically be saying "child stalkers of the world, HERE YOU GO!" and handing the bad guys everything they needed on a silver platter. I can only hope that these people get their act together and realize the threats of social networking sites before something bad happens...
DISCLAIMER: I will admit I personally can't stand MySpace anyway, so there probably is at least some bias here – but either way, those sites definitely aren't doing very much good for society, at least as far as I can tell.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
MySpace text is black on white by default. If it's hard to read, it's because the teenybopper who customized her site chose to make it that way.
Bad markup under the hood is a more valid criticism of MySpace pages, but we're not talking about building the next Amazon.com here. We're talking about a service that provides quick-and-dirty tools for high school and college kids to slap together collections of their favorite pictures, links to videos on YouTube, rants about their favorite bands/movies/whatever, and also allows public & private messages, blogging, etc.
In other words, in spite of the ugliness, it pretty much allows anybody who wants it to be their own old-school BBS Sysop.
MySpace (along with LiveJournal, Xangxa, and a few others) are delivering exactly what the World Wide Web was originally promised to be: A place where everybody can be a content publisher. IMHO, People who whine about the broken HTML and/or the goofy choices some people make with their pages are losing sight of the Big Picture.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Just to shed a little light on the awful markup..
To customize your MySpace profile at all, you need to basically type up a full stylesheet to ovverride the existing one. Not only that, but you have to type it into your "biography" infobox, where it'll load with your normal text and be chomped by the browser. As soon as your browser is done completely spacking out at the multiple nonstandard chunks of info being thrown at it from directions not normally expected, it digests it all into something almost, but not entirely, unlike a webpage.
Now obviously, the kids on Myspace by and large aren't web designers, and even if they take that HTML 101 class in middle school, they aren't going to be the type to slap together a stylesheet from scratch, much less hack one out to Myspace specs. These are the users more comfortable with something like Geocities or Livejournal use, where you can intuitively point-and-click your way through a few templates and customize them to your heart's content. However, Myspace is pretty much uncostomizable unless you use a stylesheet.
So, the kids who want to customize but can't stomach the various CSS tutorials long enough to misuse that information for evil, turn to a few services that have come up which generate a myspace stylesheet for you point-and-click style, but also insert ads for themselves into the code, which is usually dodgy code to begin with. And that's alongside Myspace's normal pervasive ads, which are annoying and usually badly scripted.
Then we get to the music and video gadgets MySpace uses, these bloated chunks of Flash that load more bandwidth-and-resource-sucking garbage, usually immediately on page load. Add to this the Google Video, Youtube, Imageshack, and about 47 billion other third-party content hosts, each with their own scripts, cookies, and bugs to add to the page, and their own bandwidth to suck. And on top of all that, Myspace is constantly pushing the bounds of its own resources, so if your page does manage to load at all, some important bits might not show up.
And this all doesn't even begin to take into account the natural result of non-web-designers designing webpages with no templates or handholding. The overloads of stupid gifs (and I love my own animated gifs so very very much, but have some limits, people!) horrible auto-loading music and video (I admit to embedding MIDIs into web pages in the early 90s, I'm still paying for that karmically. For example, this morning I woke up with my ears infested with fire ants. Lesson=learned!) and neon-green-text-on-bright-yellow-background-itis.
So basically, the site is broken by design, broken by its lack of resources, with a broken implementation further broken by its users.
Other than that, it's sound as a pound.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Actually, I think people whine because they've learned the truth of the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." People's myspace sites aren't just poor html; they're hideously ugly and frequently illegible, with the most obnoxious possible music playing in the background with dubious legality. Myspace would be a much more hospitable place to "hang out" if people had the taste and restraint to make it not painful to see.
The problem with MySpace is the problem with the Web generally: there's lots of content, but none of it is any damn good.