<story><title>MySpace: what went wrong – by its former VP of online marketing</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/06/myspace-what-went-wrong-sean-percival-spotify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aaronchall</author><text>I was an early user of both MySpace and Facebook. MySpace came first. It seemed like an easy way to create a rather customizable web presence. I created a page myself. But the experience sucked. Most customizers turned their MySpace page into a really bad website, with (loud) music that would automatically start up, and you were always a click away from a near-pornographic image (uh, Dad, Mom, no it&amp;#x27;s just MySpace, I&amp;#x27;m not surfing for porn!)&lt;p&gt;The article seems off base. I don&amp;#x27;t get how Facebook avoids being all over the place. But, yeah, they did avoid the obnoxious ads (at first), and I can visit someone&amp;#x27;s page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop.&lt;p&gt;Could they have avoided losing out to Facebook? I think if they created MySpace 2.0 without all the crap (essentially what Facebook did) and made it easy to migrate your accounts and activity, they could have prevented Facebook from taking over social. But they didn&amp;#x27;t, and it was crap, and I basically put up a MySpace message saying I was moving to Facebook for all the reasons, and that&amp;#x27;s where people could find me. And I think a lot of other people followed suit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krrrh</author><text>I totally agree with this, and when Facebook launched it was clear to me that the restrictions it placed on customization of profile pages, and providing smart defaults for layout, don&amp;#x27;t, and color would make social more functional and valuable for most users.&lt;p&gt;But I still appreciate Ze Frank&amp;#x27;s defense of ugly wrt MySpace democratizing design tools, and his observations that the fact that so many people were cutting, modifying, and pasting css was at the time weird and kind of wonderful.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;interconnected.org&amp;#x2F;home&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;22&amp;#x2F;ze_frank_on_ugly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don&amp;#x27;t necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers.
&amp;gt; 
&amp;gt; In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.</text></comment>
<story><title>MySpace: what went wrong – by its former VP of online marketing</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/06/myspace-what-went-wrong-sean-percival-spotify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aaronchall</author><text>I was an early user of both MySpace and Facebook. MySpace came first. It seemed like an easy way to create a rather customizable web presence. I created a page myself. But the experience sucked. Most customizers turned their MySpace page into a really bad website, with (loud) music that would automatically start up, and you were always a click away from a near-pornographic image (uh, Dad, Mom, no it&amp;#x27;s just MySpace, I&amp;#x27;m not surfing for porn!)&lt;p&gt;The article seems off base. I don&amp;#x27;t get how Facebook avoids being all over the place. But, yeah, they did avoid the obnoxious ads (at first), and I can visit someone&amp;#x27;s page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop.&lt;p&gt;Could they have avoided losing out to Facebook? I think if they created MySpace 2.0 without all the crap (essentially what Facebook did) and made it easy to migrate your accounts and activity, they could have prevented Facebook from taking over social. But they didn&amp;#x27;t, and it was crap, and I basically put up a MySpace message saying I was moving to Facebook for all the reasons, and that&amp;#x27;s where people could find me. And I think a lot of other people followed suit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>catshirt</author><text>&amp;quot;I can visit someone&amp;#x27;s page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;i hated auto-playing music until it didn&amp;#x27;t exist anymore. now i miss the individuality. not specifically the music but also the other ways you could customize the page. in case anyone isn&amp;#x27;t familiar, you could basically just embed arbitrary html&amp;#x2F;css&amp;#x2F;js.</text></comment>