I mean, what the fuck. I’ve been on the interwebz for more than a decade now. I sort of drift in and out of being in the know about the latest internet crazes.
So now I’m drifting back in, and we have myspace. And I don’t get it. Back in the day, just about everyone had a really really shitty homepage, often on glurge sites like geocities. Animated gifs, poor spacing, horizontal scrolls from text lines being too long: virtually every shade of “clashing colors” imaginable, embedded midi music. Eventually, aolspeak and aol homepages were all the rage, and they were HORRIBLE.
But, it was ok. The web was young. We were all just playing around with the technology. But I thought we grew up? Even the “host a webpage for five-year-olds” services got the idea that they’d better have some decent design tools to keep user’s pointless homepages from looking like total ass. And all was good. CSS arrived, web design became cool, and blogs ushered in an age of fairly decently composed and formatted user-content.
And now: myspace. What the fuck? Is it like some sort of retro thing where they are making fun of having no sense of screen size, taste, or style? Somehow this thing is so big that even mainstream media-savvy things like bands that ALREADY have good websites all have myspaces. And they are just as amatuer-looking as all the rest.
What is going on here? Can anyone clue me in? What’s the point of if being so god-awful?
I think we already did this. Maybe someone’ll dig that thread back up.
Anyway, Myspace is popular because of it’s accessibility. It’s so easy that everyone can make a page.
All of which are, y’know, completely subjective. It seems irrelevent to your argument if you find a particular layouts at Myspace garish or offensive, but the simple solution to that problem is to just not visit said website.
Everyone could “make a page” with a million other different “pointless homepage/blog” generators that have existed for years and years.
And, I’m sorry, but no. This isn’t a matter of subjective. If you tell me that this looks good:
I’m not going to treat it like “oh, he didn’t like the godfather? Well, taste is taste and we all have different tastes.” I’m going to be 100% convinced that you are fucking lying to me, because no one in their right mind thinks that’s a stylin webpage. Even the halfway normal ones:
have a “hi, I just shit out everything and the kitchen sink onto this one page” design ethic. No one can pretend that that’s good.
I don’t understand this kind of person who finds something they do not like and feels the need to degrade it or attempt to get it destroyed… There’s plenty of other webpages or things you could be doing with your mind rather than fuming over this on the refresh button.
In essence, it is not much different than any other kind of community. And has probably brought many good things to people over the bad…Have you ever given it a chance? It’s a good free resource for bands targeting the younger audiences or comedians and a mindless place to keep in touch with friends; it shouldn’t be taken that seriously!
They DID. And it was… welll, still pointless, but it was at least something of an advance from the geocities era. Now it seems like we’re back at square one, complete with the overuse of rows and rows of context-less animated gifs.
It was a JOKE. We all got it because we were making fun of how stupid we used to be. Now people seem to take it seriously with: this is my AWESOME MYSPACE PAGE!!!
Ah, shut up you prissy finger-wagger. We adults are quite capable of being amazed and confused by the goofiness of something without you lecturing us on how the tooth-fairy doesn’t like harsh langauge and we should all go back to contemplating the beauty of gumdrops. Get bent.
All i have to say is that only bitches talk shit and ppl need to back there shit up and when they don’t that pisses me off so bad i mean i’m not goin to walk around like i am a bad ass and try and fight everyone but if ur goin to talk shit then say it to ppl’s faces and not be a pussy or ur ass’s will get rocked ok!!
The problem with Myspace layouts is that it is seriously hard to design for Myspace. They disable some fairly normal tags, so that you have to design around some built in wonkiness. They also have really weird named tags - your layers involve “orangetext” “bluetext” “redtext” etc etc. To top it all off, you can hardly put in comments and they disable the easy work around to the Hell That is Designing for IE.
So, you can solve this by doing CSS overlays, essentially hiding your Myspace page and building on top of it. That is what I did here: Zombie (zombiesingreensboro) on Myspace .
I have also seen one or two professional Myspaces that were not done with overlays, but I am in no way that decent to be able to work out all the hellish underbelly of Myspace.
So, some people have horrible Myspaces because they have horrible taste. But I suspect a lot of people just don’t feel like getting all into web design and neglecting common CSS procedures to make a static, sterile Myspace layout.
That was done without using overlays. Notice how he wasn’t able to get rid of all the random boxes, as in the “such and such is in your extended network” one.
Then, there is this guy, who did overlays like myself:
It just became cool because a lot of indy bands were uploading their music and kids were going there to find the next red hot chili peppers. Then all the kids were on it. Then all the celebrities that want kids to think they were cool were on it. Now it is ubiquitous.
Myspace is an okay website, but I think they got lucky with their popularity.
REALLY REALLY lucky. But now that it’s popular, it doesn’t look like it’ll be fading fast anytime soon.
And lets face it…teenagers and young adults are idiots. They’ll fall for anything, including crappy products and websites. Now that a big company is running the whole Myspace deal…it’s just easy pickings for them in terms of money from advertisements and such.
I’ve seen a movie advertisement change the colors and layouts of the entire front page. Yikes.