Let's look at some of their failures up close:
- Blogs - I was always convinced that Myspace tossed in the blog tool simply because they read about it being a cool new tool that all the kids were using. They never put any time into actually making the tool useful. Or stable. When it wasn't "down for maintenance" they were making ridiculous changes that would ban you from trying to insert perfectly valid links to sites that you wanted people to see. No RSS feeds, no networks, not useful.
- SPAM - I have always felt that the SPAM problem on Myspace wasn't really that big of an issue to the people who run the site. Would anyone really be surprised if they found out that Myspace was making money off of the very same spammers they were pretending to stop? Sure you may read how Myspace sued a few spammers, but I wonder if they just went after the spammers who weren't giving them 10% of the cut.
- Ads - Even their legitimate advertisers were an annoyance. Between the ads that made noises, forcing you to hit your mute button while at work, and the constant deluge of singles ads that insulted your intelligence - I was almost happy to see the BRIGHT BLINKY ANNOYING CLICK ME NOW ads!
- Names - When I created my first account on Myspace 5 years ago I was really disappointed by their lack of maiden name support. How could I find an old friend of mine if she got married and changed her last name? I wrote to support and suggested this feature. I'm sure I wasn't the first to do so either. Yesterday, January 27th 2009, I got an email from Tom telling me that they finally have maiden name support. Wow that must have been a lot of work to put an extra freaking name field into the database and to toss the extra line of code into the profile editor. This is a perfect example of why Facebook is now kicking Myspace's ass.
- Accessability - Unless you have a fairly new computer with a fairly decent connection, forget about Myspace. Their phone/portable version of the site is sloppy, poorly featured, and buggier than a homeless guy's groin. On slower computers their ads (see above) can slow you down to a standstill. (This is because they accept/use ads that use what is called "Alpha Channel" in their animations. Alpha'd stuff takes a BIG hit on your CPU.)
- Community - The biggest failure, in my book, was their total inability to help grow individual communities within the site itself. Say you wanted to talk to people from Tampa to find out some info about the town before you fly in for the Superbowl. Your only real choice is to find a group with the word "Tampa" in it and hope to find someone who actually reads their poorly designed groups. Then you could try to get some answer from them. Most people have given up on the groups, because again, they are poorly managed and nearly impossible to use.
- Bands - I feel bad for the bands who try and use this shitty site to promote themselves. I mean yeah it's a great place to slap your music up, but have you ever seen what these poor bastards have to do to reach their fucking audience? They can't send a message to all of their friends. Nope. They can't invite more than 200 people to an event - and even that is painful. They can't count on anyone actually using the MySpace calendar because Myspace no longer cares about events or helping people find them. (If anyone disagrees with me here, please tell me the last time you used their calender to find something to do!)
- Fuck Tom - Seriously. Change your goddamn picture. Stop sending me messages as if you are a real dude and not some poorly paid shift worker who was told to spam out a message to the users. Just dump the lie and fess up to being a 300 person company who spends most of your time sorta trying to fix the broken shit and ZERO percent of your time trying to make good tools.
Yeah sure I'll keep my Myspace page around. I still have my Friendster page up afterall.
