An Open Letter to Myspace
Dear the eponymous, “Myspace Tom”, myspace developers, myspace users, and Fox Interactive Media,
Right off the bat, let me make it known that I’ve been a regular myspace user since 2004; I’ve held several accounts over that time, and made use of a lot of the features available to members over my tenure. I’ve made some incredible friends over that time, and found some really wonderful music as well. I’ve seen the site flourish from its infancy into the at-least-US$580 million empire that it is today: a conglomerate that is known internationally as a hub of online community. They say that once the name of your product has been introduced into international lexicon, you’ve made it. To this end, I’d say myspace had quite firmly rooted itself in the history books as being an eponymous name for an online community.
That being said, there is still the flaws that we are all haunted by: spam, account break-ins, usability, and functionality. For a site with [conservatively] 100,000,000 registered accounts to go unnoticed to this end is absolute insanity. However, I still feel the way things are being solved is the completely wrong way. To hinder the user experience to combat a [comparatively] isolated issue is going about things the total wrong way. Think of it as Gun Control. Admittedly, controversial topic to make comparison to, however, when in perspective it offers a sufficient level of clarity to the matter. Let’s say spammers are the equivalent of fatal shooting instances, and user accounts are the total amount of guns. In perspective, the amount of the aforementioned “guns” (user accounts) responsible for the “shootings” (spam) is considerably low. Then, logically, isn’t it a little bit of overkill to try and eliminate the instances of “shootings” (spam) by completely hindering the possession of “guns” (user accounts) to a level that is both impractical and overall ineffective at fighting the cause it aims to? In my humble opinion this is.
Let’s put this into the real-life application of myspace. Phishing is a known nuisance on the site, attributed to the majority of users being extremely novice to not only the internet itself, but computers in general. To combat this, the development team have came up with an algorithm that turns any link contained in a profile into a “myspace link” as “Tom” informed all accounts through a notice earlier this year. For those not in the know, this involves all URLs being changed on-the-fly to http://www.msplinks.com/[hash], where the hash is a generated string of letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, and the occasional typographical symbol (as far as I can gather, this is the = normally). This happens to every link posted, regardless of whether or not it is an internal myspace link. This makes it extremely impractical to know where you’re clicking to without the visible feedback offered by regular URLs in the status bar of the modern browser. This is not only a huge bandwidth consumer, but also a massive timewaster. For working individuals who have bandwidth limits, this is not impressive. In fact, it’s quite infuriating. The biggest problem is one of reliability of those labelling the links, and the ability to trust the accuracy of where their links are pointing.
This is kind of like putting a garbage bag on in place of a condom because it doesn’t feel “secure enough”. Sure, I can understand what the intent was, but really, for a site with such a financial backing behind it, the coding team must be at least remotely okay. And nobody came up with the idea of using regular expressions to root out internal myspace links? There is a definite structure to links on myspace, as I’ve personally verified by writing numerous userscripts to fix some of the things that bug me most. Because of this definite structure, writing a regular expression function would not be hard. I’ve never written ColdFusion at length before [I personally find it an inferior coding language, but that is neither here nor there]; however the simplicity in any language should exist.
What does this gain? It saves time (and not to mention, money) for the end-user, saves frustration, and provides a level of trust-control over the links you click. As it stands, blind-linking makes links less attractive to click because you have absolutely no idea where they lead. See what I’m getting at? Not really community based.
Uhhhh… what? Now you’re just clutching at straws, guys. For a multitude of reasons, actually. First and foremost, how does a CAPTCHA aid in stopping phishers? CAPTCHA may HELP (key word here is HELP) in detecting computers from people; however it is critically flawed in a number of ways. First being that it’s not impossible to beat a CAPTCHA with a computer. This has been proven several times against a number of high-end CAPTCHA systems. What makes yours so different from this? Nothing in absolute honesty. Second problem here is accessibility. CAPTCHA in itself is basically designed to block anything (or indeed, anyone) without the ability to read the image. This means, anyone who is blind, using a screen reader, or incapable of loading images is cut out. Not really very conducive to community feeling, is it? Having worked extensively with people with disabilities (and yes, being disabled myself), I know just how frustrating it is to deal when someone has not catered to your condition adequately. Also while on the thing of CAPTCHA, why do I have to fill out a new one every 30 seconds when I change 2 letters in my profile while testing it? That is the biggest annoyance of all. If I’ve filled one out a minute prior, one can fairly well assume that it’s still me using the computer. It’s more than easy enough to implement user idle time (there’s a primitive system of it for the online check), why not exploit that to judge whether or not the user is still at the computer? Say, no page requests for fifteen minutes would dictate a user being idle, or something similar to this effect. Once more, it’s wrapping the site in cotton wool for fear of a scratch.
And finally, when customising profiles, why oh why can’t we move the ad around to somewhere less obtrusive? On the same note of regular expressions, it’s pretty easily to tell when a CSS rule has moved something out of the window of view or changed its size. All I ask is the ability to move where it’s positioned relative to a page. Hell, even a selection in the profile section enabling a few different options for where it is placed in the page. For instance, different format ads, tower, long, wide, top, bottom, left-hand, right-hand, all that jazz. It’ll still be there, the revenue will still come, it just makes it less god-awful for those of us who actually have some mild knowledge of aesthetics.
There will be more, don’t you worry.
Thank you,
Benjamin “newklear” Alldridge.
Comments
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I read this thoroughly was initially suprised at your knowledge of computers, people usually batter myspace without actually understanding what they’re even questioning. So bravo for that, and thanks for the info. Also, the topics you raised(especially the ever so annoying Captcha) are topics I am almost certain the every myspace user feels the same way about.
As pointless as it might be, have you ever tried to send this to Tom?
And also, have you ever thought that Captchas might be there just so people are less inclined to change a few unecessary words in their “about me” section every two seconds?
I think this post is something any myspace user, with half a brain cell(to understand it), can relate to…
Even you don’t choose to act on any of these topics, it’s still worth reading
Thankssss x
Let’s also not forget the fact that its design scheme is—to myself and most users—atrocious (tables? so 1990s), not to mention it’s not exactly user-friendly either.
(Go Facebook and Virb!)