Is Myspace eternally craptastic?
Posted: 06/07/08
My jury has been out for like two years on whether or not Myspace is worth the money that News Corp. paid for it, or let alone the time that folks like myself spend on it. After slow improvements to the site, I kept trying to give it more chances. First they added a friend feed similar to Facebook so you can stalk your favourite friends, and then just recently they claimed to have overhauled the service and added applications, similar to, you guessed it – Facebook.
The problem is, the site is still full of errors, the mp3 players often don’t work still, and the applications are bound to slow down the site even more, as well make people’s profiles uglier than ever. But does it mean that Myspace is still crappy?
From a musician’s standpoint, it’s managed to hold its own over the years when other sites have been creeping up. A big one that most people still don’t know about is imeem, a fantastic media networking application.
Although i’ve seen some big names open up imeem accounts and go through the work of customizing their profile (which can be laborious), I still haven’t seen droves of people moving over there, and it appears as if Myspace will continue on as usual, even if their updates didn’t address the core problems of the site. Those problems are related to the fact that it’s running on outdated and shoddy code!
So I guess this is the essence of a good social networking service. Even though Facebook is rock-solid, it doesn’t hold a candle to the places where people are already entrenched and living. Myspace is a great place for networking with other musicians, and even though thinking about the site makes me angry, if you factor in its usefulness, it’s not all that bad.