MySpace: your one-stop spot for jailbait and adware

[illusionofjoy]

In concept, I think MySpace is a good idea. However, I've found that in practise, those who maintain (and I use that word loosely) the site seem much more interested in ad revenue than useability. Frankly, I would have deleted my music profile from the site eons ago if it weren't for the mind-boggling number of hits it receives on a daily basis. However, I am forced to wonder how many users experience the same things on my page that I experience visiting another artist's page. Namely: the top banner ad always loads and the profile page itself will load 90% of the time, but I can flip a coin and call heads or tails as to whether or not the Flash music player will load, thus allowing me to hear what said band actually sounds like.

Of course, the technical problems with MySpace are far from limited to the music players on artist pages. Innumerable are the number of times I've clicked a link on the site only to receive an error message assuring me that the problem "has been forwarded to the MySpace technical group." This "technical group" must consist of the world's busiest geek - and I'm being optimistic in assuming that anyone on the "technical group" is actually doing anything aside from sitting on their asses, eating Twinkies.

One thing I have noticed is that, with the exception of total page-load failure and computer freeze-up (tell me, how does a website freeze one's computer?), one thing will always load on MySpace: the banner ad at the top of the page. And, lo, MySpace has the world's most annoying Flash banner ads. These things blink, they make obnoxious noises and I'm sure they'd fill the room with annoying smells had we the technology to do such a thing. Oh, and here's something else: MySpace ads might infect your computer with malicious software. Cute, eh?

Comments

[trhodes.livejournal.com]

Freezing the computer is the art of bad programming - probably memory leaks which are causing a complete drainage of resources and Windows freaks out. My computer has paused several moments viewing certain band profile pages. In my opinion, people go out of their way to spice up their profile not seeing how loading tons of oversized pictures intermixed with the bad programming of Myspace can cause a lot of problems. I purposely leave my pages as simple as possible to avoid this.

As for the infections - they aren't right and someone needs to look into a lawsuit about it. I'm clueless as to how any company could think they would be well off by installing unrequested adverts in public computers, and while they call it marketing, I call it trespassing. Yet, I don't worry about these things much being a Unix user; however, my parents are Windows users and every time this causes a problem, I want to bill my time out to some company. Hmmm, that sounds interesting. ... tap tap tap ... there, I visited one of the sites and sent an email about billing them for my time cleaning their banner ads. Let's see what happens.

--
Tom Rhodes

[illusion-of-joy.livejournal.com]

Do keep me updated...