Two Slashes

Eons ago, I vowed never again to write an article bashing MySpace or social networking. As you can see, my favorite topic to bash has once again made an appearance. So much for promises…

Judging from the growing popularity of all manner of social networking sites and the increasing rate at which they seem to be introduced, it’s a hard point to make saying they’ll be disappearing anytime soon. For a world that once prided itself in being separate entities, it almost seems as though everyone wants to remove those borders in their attempts to communicate with the world. I’m not just talking about blogging; people of all shapes, colors, nationalities, religions, and any other classification are reaching out not just to each other, but to other people.

Yeah, yeah…your response is a resounding “No s**t”, right? The funny thing though, is that even though better, more polished options continue to be released, people still continue to flock to the big names like Facebook and MySpace. My question is, why go for the bottom of the barrel when there are much more suitable and professional options available?

If I may, I’ve compiled a list of what I feel are the biggest reasons why people seem to flock to the crappier solutions.

1. Popularity. Yes, the user count. The number of people who actively use the service and have accounts. For places like MySpace, I would not be suprised that the service has more members than there are people in the world. Why? For starters, people seem to enjoy creating bogus profiles in the names of their friends, enemies, and even random people they meet on the street, either making them seem like they’re better people than they actually are, or defiling them into a smoldering pile of garbage.

   Of course, there are more than your average users. How about the numerous people who sit around scamming people out of their passwords and e-mail addresses simply by recreating a login form in the image of the site they’re on. I mean, how stupid do people have to be to not realize that even web development today has evolved beyond inserting your username and password into the URL string or having to enter them every time you want to do something. Or, while I’m mentioning URLs, the fact that most sites have a “login” domain or similar for just this purpose.

2. Customization. Sure, flashing backgrounds that alternate between bright pink and lime green might look cool to you, but to most people they merely trigger their epilepsy. There’s a reason the “smarter” sites only give you one theme, or a choice of a few predesigned ones. They look well with other profiles, and they don’t drive anyone blind trying to read the text. Not to mention it (again) makes things too easy for people to make fake pages. In short: Not everyone’s a designer; that’s why you hire professionals to make sure things look good rather than trying to do everything yourself…especially when you don’t have an eye for it.
3. Friends and the Popularity Contest (not to be confused completely with number 1). Why would someone join a service that their friends are not all on, and that they can’t use to prove to their friends that they’re the most popular person they know? What’s more disturbing is that this popularity isn’t all based upon real friends either; it’s a mess of random people asking others to indicate their friendship merely out of trust and a desire to increase their numbers. After all, who needs friends like these? And those are just the tip of the iceburg; I’m sure everyone is friends with a pair of ladies’panties or someone who appears in the same picture displayed on a few different profiles (single person, aka portrait, not group photo where it might actually make some sense…)
4. Backend and Coding Language [geeky]. Why is it that the crappiest sites need to be written in such a way that always causes them to break? MySpace is example numero uno, complete with buggy scripts that need to constantly be “updated” by Tom to handle the constant breakage that occurs. Now, for sites like Adobe’s where they use ColdFusion (even though the site doesn’t exactly look the best) and there are probably just as many hits per day on the same script, I’d like to know why MySpace can’t keep their stuff working. It’s not a server problem, and bulletins don’t just start posting their f**king damn selves for no reason…it’s called write the code so it works, and don’t introduce “bugs” into it so you can claim it’s dead and take it down for a while. For example, Pownce is still in beta, and it hasn’t once given me trouble, unlike my MySpace account (Note: Notice that MySpace ISN’T beta?) which suddenly began informing me that all the friends in my list were banned last night as I was flipping through old bulletins. Maybe it’s just me, but people seem to find these bugs almost attractive. I’m drawn to stuff that seems odd or out of place, but I don’t mean in poorly-coded computer-oriented areas; I mean real-life stuff.
5. Sharing. Sharing information. Sharing files. Sharing…well, anything that might be interesting or necessary. And in one respect, the bigger the site, the easier it is to find anything you’re looking for with fewer problems. Ironically, I’ve yet to see anyone allow the sharing of anything beyond an MP3 and the entire contents of one’s phone book. But it seems for some concepts (ideally, the ones most people don’t bother with, but would be more interesting to someone with interests outside the realms of looking like a complete idiot) people looking for such a sharing capability are lost. Take MySpace’s new download section, for instance. Sounds like a great place for a freeware developer like myself to be – all these people running amok – it’s any traffic analyst’s dream…right? Yeah, right…take one look at the utilities on that page and explain to me just what reason a person needs to see a list of downloads for that stuff for. Why can’t people, erm…share…their work…even if it’s made of bits and bytes of assembly, script, or anything along that line? (Admittedly, it might be a security measure, but all the same it could be set up so that people can add to those lists if their software passes some sort of inspection.)

Alright, I think I’ve gone on enough. And considering I didn’t keep my promise this time around, chances are there are several more articles that will be posted. But that’s a post for a different day altogether.