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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't, and color would make social more functional and valuable for most users.

But I still appreciate Ze Frank'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.

http://interconnected.org/home/2012/05/22/ze_frank_on_ugly

> As people start learning and experimenting with these languages authorship, they don't necessarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers. > > In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that "work" 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.

Yeah, first we all had our own Geocities site and then there was stuff like LiveJournal. Then Myspace came along and continued the slow decline of options for the user who was interested enough to customize their page. Still, I remember just as many people not caring how it worked and pasting all sorts of "pimp your myspace" stuff into their page and in the process, opening up all sorts of opportunities for phishers and spammers.

Facebook was a little more "Apple-like" in that they preferred not to even offer you the tools with which you might crapify your profile. The most obvious result has been that your profile and feed are only crapped up when it's by Facebook themselves but at the same time, I do think it's a shame that so many younger (or just newer) folks won't necessarily have the same easy opportunity to start messing around with HTML and CSS and other stuff the way people in the 90's and earlier 00's had loads of tools to tinker around with their personal "homepage" of choice.

Not saying there aren't plenty of chances to learn that stuff still but I know the barrier is a lot lower when that site everyone uses also offers some chance to learn and customize.

Its not just ugly as some kind of aesthetic issue, it also hurt functionality. Buttons could be moved or made invisible. Animated backgrounds would make things hard to find, etc.

But that's not MySpace's biggest sin. Its biggest problem was all the freedom it gave just helped turn into a defacto dating site. With no real rules and no focus on anything, girls put up lots of cleavage photos for attention and guys hit on them. Guys put up shirtless leering photos and girls responded. Comments were more often bawdy talk than not. Teens and 20 somethings ruled. It never migrated past a high school mentality. A bit like how Second Life has now pretty much become a fetish site for furries.

Then Facebook showed up with its academic focus. The existing userbase were all college students whose peers, professors, potential employers, family, etc had access to their profiles, so there was a disincentive to treat it like "da club." People put their personal and semi-professional faces up and when the floodgates were open to Joe User, he saw the culture there, the lack of customizations, etc and conformed to what Facebook was. It had the mainstream professional and familial mores its roots were built upon. The Wild West of the Myspace world was just too self-limiting in this case. It couldn't go mainstream with its culture. It was too "young person trying to get laid" focused.

A bit like how Second Life has now pretty much become a fetish site for furries.

I think many of us realized that SL had little potential beyond that even in its infancy. Minecraft soaked up the remaining interest in the potential of the programmable, realtime virtual worlds quite nicely.

"I can visit someone's page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop."

i hated auto-playing music until it didn'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't familiar, you could basically just embed arbitrary html/css/js.

I wonder how they prevent Remote Code Execution. Because >just embed arbitrary html/css/js is THE definition of RCE.

Poorly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)

Tumblr now fills this void, and in a much more free and customizable way than MySpace did.

> But, yeah, they did avoid the obnoxious ads (at first)

I think that's debatable, perhaps it wasn't as bad as MySpace at the time, but the facebook I joined in 2008 was fairly obnoxious with advertisers using profile pictures of the users left and right; the thought of it becoming a company the size of Google never crossed my mind back then. In retrospect I think they were very lucky not to lose their userbase and traction to a better service when the advertising and application spam got unbearable.

I'm one of the few people I think who joined MySpace after Facebook since my college opened the doors to FaceBook 2005 (or more accurate FaceBook opened it's doors).

MySpace was the wild west of social networking. I only joined after so many people kept asking if I'd join. FaceBook was so limited when it started out, with minimal interactions, one picture and groups. The only reason Myspace lasted as long as it did was FaceBook took time to gear up and open to the public. After that, it was doomed.

Facebook's main appeal to me was that users couldn't customize their pages. It was fantastic. When they allowed everyone to embed "apps" all over their pages, I disabled it and stopped using it for awhile until they got that cleaned up.

MySpace was a stepping stone from GeoCities to Facebook.