Two years ago when I first started playing with my “Space”, I thought it was a very interesting and useful idea. There were a few other websites out there that were using similar social networking models. These sites were mostly dating sites. I found MySpace to be very useful, with features that were rich and networking possibilities that were endless.

As time went by little innovation was being developed from the creators of MySpace. There has been no real user interface innovation and or changes over the years. Most of the development focus has been placed on money making areas such as video and audio sections. I once liked the music section, but now I feel that it’s flawed. It’s not smart enough… there are no listening suggestions, and there is no way to network with groups or genres based off of what you listen to and/or enjoy. Check out LastFM if you really want to play with music in a social networking environment. The MySpace video area was an exact rip-off of YouTube, whom pioneered the social video networking scene. So really what have they really succeeded in doing? Advertising? I honestly do not know.

MySpace is constantly plagued with security issues, broken pages, spamming, phishing, invalid coding, and an unbelievable amount of page errors. I’m amazed that the general public that uses MySpace hasn’t jumped ship and joined other networking sites like FaceBook.

I understand the desire for a social website allowing people an option to customize their “Space”, but if it were me, I’d pull on the reigns a bit. Why might you ask? Well one reason is that the code is just damn sloppy. It is very difficult to read most people’s profiles. The creators of MySpace created a very sloppy and difficult way to manage each person’s own content. Coders who wanted a better way to customize their pages hacked their “Space” and placed it in the “About Me” section and other prominent areas to achieve a certain look. As popularity increased on MySpace these hacks became more widespread. A lot of external websites took advantage of these hacks and have made an enormous amount of money off shameless advertising by making generators that place ads on a person’s page. What does the end-user get out of this? Well if you ask them they’d say a nicer looking page, but if you ask me it’s just a way to promote shameless advertising, improper coding, and a terrible user experience.

MySpace has allowed improper and invalid XHTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Half of the MySpace profiles that I visit cause my browser to crash because it simply cannot handle the amount of content and/or the errors it’s receiving. Why didn’t they close these hole’s you might ask, good question, the reason they didn’t remove the ability to hack was that if they did remove the ability to skin one’s site that they would receive a endless and bloody backlash form those that use it. It would lead to millions of dollars lost in failed advertising. We saw something similar like this a few months ago with FaceBook. Again I’ll save story for a future post.

Amazing enough MySpace is still growing. According to Alexia, MySpace is the sixth most popular site on the Internet. I found FaceBook ranked at 35. I thought it was really neat that YouTube ranked at fifth, and Google right ahead of it at fourth. So who is number one? Yahoo is ranked number one and I think they’ve really earned it, but I will save those thoughts for another post.

So we’ll have to wait and see if MySpace is really “Dying”. I still enjoy MySpace, mostly because it allows me to have interaction with my friends. However it would be really nice to see some more innovation out there from the folks at MySpace. I’d like to see them ditch UI, and get off that god awful ColdFusion. FaceBook could be one of these innovators, and I’ve decided to try it out. I’ll blog about it in a few months when I am a bit more experienced with it!