Is Facebook any better? Will they split, like MTV and VH1, eventually? ( I know that Facebook and Myspace are two different things, I’m just thinking out loud here).
If it helps you keep in touch with people that you otherwise wouldn’t, then more power to it (and you).
I am a bit leery of posting alot of personal stuff online–in some ways it is so ephemeral, but stuff can also live forever and take on a life of its own in cyberspace.
I’ll just have to keep diaries, which my progeny can find, tied in blue ribbons, in the attic, long after I’m dust…
I’ve always seen trash, since childhood, and I’ve always known it as such. Trash is omnipresent and everpresent. The human being is the primary vector for trash…No, the human being is the only vector for trash. And who else but human beings use myspace?
I disagree. Trees litter all the god damn time, and nobody ever calls them on it. Dropping leaves all over the ground, willy-nilly. Someone should pass a law!
IMO, Facebook seems to target specific demographics, whereas Myspace is more a ‘anyone welcome’ attitude. Each approach has benefits and drawbacks.
Understandable, and I am careful about what I put on Myspace - the same as I’m careful what I put here, or anywhere else. Not that my Myspace page is anonymous and without photos, but there’s no pour-your-heart-out blog entries, either.
Except for the last link, these are all musician’s pages. First, since my mention of “good music” was called into question and second, because I consider it an invasion of privacy to put up links to individual people’s pages to satisfy doubters. Most of these people’s fans are the opposite of those people (rightly) held up for ridicule in this thread.
I only chose pages that are styled in some way, some very simple, some more elaborate. In a way, that rule was a shame, music-wise, because so many good bands/artists that I wanted to list don’t have their pages styled at all and for whatever reason have decided to stick with MySpace’s white/orange/blue color scheme. My opinion is that Tom made the default pages so ugly to encourage people to trick up their own. It’s certainly not his fault if some people go apeshit while doing it.
This took me, all told, a few hours to compile, but I was constantly hijacked into listening to the music. Not all of this music will appeal to everybody, and of course, “not appealing” is not the same as “bad.” I like all this music, but then I’m weird. I never would have heard of 85% of these people if not for MySpace. Even if they all had their own web sites, how would I have known to go there? MySpace brings a lot of unknown talent into one place.
Time prevented me from finding more non-music pages, but there are thousands worth checking out. Ballet/dance companies, Art museums, film makers, authors, comedians and on and on and on can be found there.
I didn’t think to make note while I was compiling how old these artists were. They range, but more than you’d think are probably between 25-50 with some older. In general, the older artists attract older fans who don’t stink up their personal pages with crap.
This list is woefully short. Anyone who thinks that this list is all I could come up with should challenge me, and see what I come up with after several days of adding to it. The point is that I could go on and on and on and on. Given the sheer time it would take to copy and paste the links, I could come up with thousands. I’d rather not do that, in hopes that I will have made my MAIN point, and that is that there IS a part of MySpace that isn’t filled with jerks and idiots and doe-eyed bimbos. I rarely see that side of MySpace because I choose to stay where it’s friendly and interesting. I know that other side exists, just as I know that high school cafeterias with giggling airheads and tough jocks exist, but I have no reason to go visit high school cafeterias, just as I have no reason to visit the high school/asshole part of MySpace.
MySpace is what you make of it. You can choose what you’re exposed to and who you interact with and generally who interacts with you. People into good music (yes, my definition) are in the best position to have a good time on MySpace and ignore the rest.
Misc. Music:
Jane Siberry
Canada’s National Treasure, though not recognized as such
Here’s an example of a personal page (not mine) that’s WAY over the top, but in a most interesting way. It’s going to take ages to load up, but the beautiful pictures are worth the time, if gorgeous art is your thing: The Wahtry Taht
What can I say? Some of those are wonderful–I didn’t have time to look at all of them, never mind listen to all! That must have taken you days! :eek: And I feel bad that you went to all that trouble over such a minor thing. But you are completely correct–there are good sites on myspace and ones that I would enjoy (and even maybe want to meet the people).
Thewatrytaht one–she’s a bit too sentimental for me, but I am intrigued by the concept. I do like some of the art work, a great deal-especially the nature pics. Thank you–I have bookmarked it for future use.
And thank you for the links to Irish folk etc–I like that kind of stuff, but never seem to do anything about it. I am so un-savvy re computers and the internet, I don’t really explore around and maybe I should.
So, thanks again, Equipoise. Crow is good with hollandaise sauce.
My favorite "feature’ of MySpace is when I want to read my sister’s latest blog entry, and it tells me I have to log in to do that, and so I log in and it takes me to my own profile instead of back to my sister’s blog.
laugh thank you. I’ll look for some more Irish folk for you. There’s tons of it.
The main knocks I heard were:
All the pages are badly designed
See my post.
Everyone on MySpace is a brain-damaged teenager
See my post.
The music is all bad
See my post.
What strawman? Anyway, I didn’t do it for you. It didn’t take me very long, and I had a great time listening to lots of good music while I was doing it. That’s not sad at all.
Personally, my complaint with MySpace is certainly not that the music is bad (is this anyone’s complaint, for that matter?); after all, how could it be, since such diverse music is represented on it? Some of it’s great, some of it’s crap, as with just about every channel for accessing music. But I still believe the site is horrible, and this has nothing to do with the people on it. None of my following comments relate to the music or people, therefore, since this has nothing to do with my dislike of the site; I’m just going to have a look at the first bunch’s visual appeal.
Jane Siberry - funny, I was going to link this earlier as an example of a tasteful design. It’s quite nice. Bjork - love her, hate the page. Dark grey text on darker grey background? Pretty but unreadable. Judie Tzuke - Red on black a personal peeve; makes my eyes itch. Unreadable, especially in tiny italic font. Imogen Heap - Inoffensive colours, usual arbitrary MySpace layout. Woodstock Taylor - ditto Lunabee - Blech, scrolling text on static background. Parallax headaches. Text unreadable depending on position. The Shakers - Just the usual MySpace layout nonsensicality. White-on-black never fun IMO, but eh. Azam Ali - Pretty background, doesn’t exactly help readability though. Niyaz - Nice enough colours, still poor text contrast. Myriam-qui-chante - pleasant enough, but really only by comparison to the MySpace average. It surely says something that I can open up a page whose only real stylistic advantage is neutral, decent-contrast colours, and be actively surprised. Louisa John Krol - Have to disagree with “readable” - find the text very low contrast. Causes my browser to stutter on scrolling, it’s so image-heavy. Animated gifs all over the shop. Geocities for the modern world. Piera Gulli - Black on bright purple!? Argh! Alice Peacock - Pleasant colours. Only the usual layout issues. Hooverphonic - Eye-gougingly terrible. Semi-transparency reduces browser to a crawl and leaves content unreadable. Why why why? Annette Peacock - Pink on black again not exactly eye-friendly. Links hover to black, unreadable. Genius. Midnight Serenaders - Tolerable. Datri Bean - Link colour near-unreadable on red background, otherwise all right. Neco Case - Like you say; why semi-opaque? Why this option at all, in fact? Surely the stuff on top is what we’re supposed to be reading? This is a perfect example of an artist who I really like having an absolutely godawful MySpace page.
So, I’d say roughly two thirds of those are poor to nasty, roughly a quarter are tolerable by MySpace standards, and the rest are just awful. Just my opinion, sure, but it’s not a great running average. Their benefits are that they are all in one place, and that they have the flash music previewer. Without wanting to be antagonistic, do you really think that most of those sites you linked to are well laid-out, readable pages, with accessible information?
Argh! This is precisely what the design critics are talking about. I killed the page load after 12MB (twelve!) of random images. Are they the artist’s art? Are they random animated gifs cribbed from the web? Who knows? With the user-abusing default layout and complete lack of structure that is typical of a MySpace page, I have absolutely no idea what I’m looking at, and have to wait for every single bit of content to load on one page before exploring by scrolling at random across an absolute vomit of images. This is like going to an art gallery and discovering that they’ve ripped everything out of the frame and chucked it on the floor for the visitor to sift.
These may well be awfully nice people, and awfully talented. All I know is that their MySpace page makes me want to take away their computer for ever. Why don’t they have an image gallery, like normal people with images? Why must they show them to me all at once?
I will name an advantage that MySpace has over all the other social networking sites, however: to the best of my knowledge it has no “spam your friends with invites to sign up” feature. This is bliss. I’m sick of people I once met inviting me to expand their arbitrarily defined online sphere of “friends” on hi5, facebook, blah blah blah fucking blah. MySpace at least lets you sign up if and only if you bloody well feel like it.
Well, I will admit that a few of those I put simply because I loved their music and hoped that a few people would actually listen (for instance, Judie Tzuke and Piera Gulli), but on the whole I don’t find them as terrible as you do. Maybe my brightness is turned up more. Maybe the pages look different in different browsers. Lunabee’s page, for instance, I have no trouble reading, but I suppose I can see where some might. If I’d had more time I could have picked better examples, but I said it was coming, then was away from my computer.
Ah well. Music is my everything, and I don’t pages against the artists. And I still think they’re miles better than average.
I wish I had not put a link to The Wahtry Taht’s page, as much as I love it. If anyone friends her then snarks about her page I think I will never post on The Straight Dope again. I am very very sorry I did that.
Well sure, but I think the selection you picked illustrates the argument perfectly. You’ve picked some better than average MySpace pages, by and large, and yet most of them are by normal standards pretty poor on grounds of both colour, layout and general usability. You could’ve selected more carefully, and come up with a list of sites that were maybe okay, but that would just have proven the point again; it takes some real effort to find MySpace sites that are merely “acceptable” by reasonable design standards. Clearly the site overcomes these massive shortcomings thanks to its networking facilities (and IMO, primarily the ability for personal users to have music play on their page), but that still doesn’t make the design nice. It just means it isn’t awful enough to counteract the advantages.
My main problem is that there’s simply no structure; you’ve just got one page, and you have to scan the whole thing to find out anything of interest, or maybe peruse an entire blog’s posts for info. Any decent site would have sections to group this together; gigs, photos, samples, what have you. In MySpace it’s all in a heap, and a different heap depending on the artist, with a whole bunch of incidental crap like the umpteen “friend” avatars you have to load next to the “thx 4 the add” inanities. It’s not designed for people to look at; it’s designed for people to collect evidence of their circle. And that’s fine, but as far as disseminating information goes, it’s rubbish.
Well, they’re arguably not much worse than the average custom-designed musician’s page (and I don’t hold those against the artists either; it’s not like most of them have anything to do with it), but this is an oeuvre practically famed for its obtuseness (ever check out Radiohead’s excuse for a site?). Again, for musicians’ purposes the streaming technology is ace for getting previews out there, and that’s the site’s main advantage, but generally speaking it’s a nice feature mired in a slurry of hideousness.
I don’t know if you’re implying I’d do that or not, but I have literally no idea why you’d assume I might. I think MySpace is a horrible website; I’m not a social reprobate, for crying out loud.
I am something of an internet neophyte. I can get here and do email and google and wiki almost anything, but that’s it. I have just switched to Apple and am learning my new system etc–I don’t even know the names for half this stuff.
I am perhaps coming to this from a completely different POV than either of you. I loathe the way news is now presented on Fox etc–the many little boxes, the streaming content etc. I also don’t like garish anything–unless it’s in passing. Myspace suffers from the more is better mentality (some or most pages do), just like cable news nowadays.
A myspace page, to me, is more like a snapshot of yourself, but with some text. You should approach it as you would meeting a new person or even a job application–in a way. IOW, to me, it is NOT the place to put your innermost sexual fantasy–not even your celebrity “crush”. This harkens back to what dropzone was saying re the generational thing. It’s TMI.
I liked the pages that Equipoise linked to because for the most part, they weren’t garish or too personal or conceited as hell (do you really think we want to know that you love cats and that your fav color is pink? Oh, yes, your pic is so hawt). These pages he linked to have another focus, one that I can appreciate and explore (if I had more time).
I liked the watrytaht site, very much. Disorganized and in a heap? You bet. But I don’t know enough to know a better way of doing it (and maybe you can’t on myspace). There is an appeal to the disarray, though. Her taste in pics is not fully shared by me–there are too many pics celebrating the Mystique of Woman-all rococo and art nouveau, for one example–but there is stuff there to take in–if the mood of the websurfer is right. There are days when I can see myself enjoying the poems etc, and days that I would be impatient with the whole thing. It’s enough for me, the casual viewer–I don’t need the artwork compiled and organized. If it were a different type of page, I would.
I also hope that no-one snarks any of the sites linked here–but given this board, someone will. <sigh>
Equipoise --I like Mary Chapin Carpenter and the Talking Heads and John Lennon and the soundtrack to Bend It Like Beckham…sounds like there might be alot out there for me. But to be honest-it’s all I can do to keep up here.
I see your point about the semi-opaque, though. Maybe young eyes can see it better? Hell, I’m only 44…
Maybe it’s just utilitarian–is it possible to design better pages, within the cofines of the site’s parameters(if any?). I probably couldn’t be arsed to do so–i bet most people are the same. Pick a background, font, etc and let it be. (just wondering if this is the practice). I like being able to see the artist and the selections. I am not sure what you mean be the page layout?
