Cosmo Digital

I am, admittedly, extremely wary of creating a web log on Myspace.com. Perhaps one reason is that the company owning Myspace.com (News Corporation, same company that owns Fox News) has been caught censoring people's web logs. Perhaps it is the fact that I blame sites such as Myspace.com, where many adolescent people congregate, for the rapid alteration of English spelling and grammar in excess of that which would normally be allowed by natural language change. (Don't believe me? Here is a screenshot I took showing not one, not two, but three blantant spelling mistakes in a five word sentence. Utterly horrible.) Perhaps it is the fact that many of these same adolescent Myspace.com users must be colorblind or otherwise visually handicapped, for their Myspace.com layouts are nothing short of agony to view. (Note: flourescent pink is not a great background color...)

These initial beliefs were completely reaffirmed by my cursory examination of random Myspace "blogs". I did this by travelling to my friend's "blog" on Myspace.com, and then following the "friends" links to other Myspace.com "blogs" until my eyes began to hurt. And that was fairly soon. With layouts Such As This, it is clear that the vast majority of these people have absolutely no idea what constitutes good site design. Of course, some of this can be attributed to Myspace.com. Beginning with their rather ugly two column design, no real attention is paid to web standards. Case in point: HTML validation. Now, in order for a web site to display properly in all major browsers, attention needs to be given to making sure that the underlying code meets validation. This certainly does not happen with Myspace.com, and a brief examination showed that all the "blogs" have multiple errors and literally hundreds of warnings with their code, such as the example below:
Ouch. That hurts. In that graphic, you may also notice that one of the icons is greyed out and another has a question mark on it, showing that my browser's validation program had no idea what those things even are. In comparison, here is that same program validating this very page that you are looking at now:
Now, I realize that Myspace.com will stick a lot more stuff in their sites than I do, including more complex technologies that my validator program may be unable to process correctly. This is a valid concern, and so I decided to use this same program on another "high tech" site, such as Google Maps, which utilizes some extreme CSS and Javascript in order to acheive their seamless map effect. The result is below.
66 warnings may sound like many until compared to the abysmal 630 warnings and 19 outright errors that the first Myspace.com example has. And I know for a fact that it is not the users that are doing this. It is prevailant even on pages where no alterations have been made to the basic template. Furthermore, I know that it is not the fault of the user, because when the page begins to load, the "blog" content initially displays with zero errors, and then some additional data from Myspace.com loads, producing all those frames, errors, and warnings. Hammering these defects home is the fact that the other two "blog" sites I have tested, Blogger.com and Livejournal.com, do not produce this awesome number of errors, each staying well below a dozen warnings with my two previous test sites.

And so, I am making it very clear from this point on that I am rather biased against Myspace.com from the beginning. If I was not doing this little project, than I would stay away from that site completely. Anyway, I continued to research the site by trying to find a Terms of Service page like the other two "blog" sites had. While looking through a number of pages about the service, I did find some information that said that I did not need to disclose much information about myself, although it does seem like some users put far too much personal information up on their sites. (View Screenshot) I did eventually find a link to the Terms of Use Agreement on the registration page, and proceeded to actually read it. It is fairly innocuous, and different than the other two near identical TOS agreements for Blogger.com and Livejournal.com.

This finished, I proceeded on to their Privacy Agreement, this one present in a link off of the main page, as well as from two separate links within the Registration Page. Most of this agreement is pretty good, and the only section I was slightly concerned about was the "cookie" section, in which they say that advertisers will be allowed to set cookies on your computer as well. (View Screenshot) I immediately decided to test this, by clearing out all the cookies on my computer and then browsing a few Myspace pages. True to their statements, a few cookies from advertisers as well as the main Myspace.com site did appear, such as the ones in the image below.
Admittedly, I am not too concerned about cookies, because, contrary to popular belief, they are rather harmless. Nonwithstanding the fact that some of the cookies in the above image are set to expire in 2037, they will not steal your identity or do any damage to your computer. The only concern I have is with "uber-cookies" that are set by third party advertisers and then tracked across all the sites that those advertisers use, thus creating a listing of your browsing habits which the advertisers then use. However, I have my browser set to delete all cookies whenever I close my browser, and so am not too concerned. Beyond this, the rest of the Privacy Policy is pretty basic.

And so, taking the plunge, I signed up. From the very beginning, Myspace.com requests far more personal information about you than other sites such as Blogger.com, including first name, last name, and zip code. (View Screenshot). Once this is done, you are taken to a page where you can upload photos, showing that this site has far more emphasis on posting photos than Blogger.com or Livejournal.com. (View Screenshot) You can, however, skip this step, as I did. The next page is where you can add in some friends. (View Screenshot) However, I hate people, and so was glad to skip this step as well. I was then taken to my Myspace.com page. As I suspected, the code behind the site is fairly horrible, and my brand new, completely untouched page presented over 200 warnings to my browser's HTML validator.
This gripe aside, I began to search out where I could customize all the stuff on my new "blog". I initially went into the profile settings, where I changed my display name so it did not show my real first name. I then was able to tweak a number of the privacy options, such as who could post or add me as a friend. I need no friends! I hate you all! I was pleasantly suprised by how much of this I was able to tweak, because I was not expecting much. Looking through the site, I eventually discovered the customization page, and was likewise suprised to see the vast array of options. (View Screenshot) Thus, the horrible site designs are not the fault of Myspace.com, but rather can be attributed primarily to the stupid people using the site.

However, after I spent some time changing these settings, including adding in my own customized image header (which I was unable to easily accomplish on the other two sites), I discovered that all this customization was only for the "blog" portion of the site. The main page where a user's profile is seen remains unchanged. However, having seen other Myspace pages with these colors edited, I knew that there was a way to change this area too. The only question was how to find it.

I searched through as many site controls as I could find, but nothing came up that presented easy customization for the main (or profile) page. Admitting defeat, I read some of the site's FAQs in order to see how it is possible for so many teenage idiots to do what I am unable to even find. The FAQs were rather unhelpful, to say the least. I did find a question that addressed this (View Screenshot), but all it said that I had to do this through HTML via the "Edit Profile" page. This statement is backed up by one that is also present on the "Edit Profile" page, claiming that HTML or CSS can be used in any field. (View Screenshot) The only problem is that in many cases this is impossible to do. The maximum number of characters allowed in these fields is simply not long enough to insert CSS or even HTML code into. Even in the larger text fields in which I could put in CSS code, it did not display. Furthermore, all of these changes would be only to the fields in which they occur. I have seen Profile pages where background colors for the entire page are changed, and so it must be done somewhere other than here.

I finally looked around on other sites after doing a Google search for "Myspace customization tutorial". I did come across a CSS template I could use to customize the profile page, done by adding this into the "About Me" field in the "Edit Profile" page. It doesn't make any sense as to why it has to be done here, but I would do whatever ended up working. Looking through this template, I was glad I found it, for there was no way I could have figured out all the class names which the Myspace.com profile used. And the Myspace.com Help pages sure as hell didn't tell me any of those names, so this external site was the only way to go without looking through the page's source code and trying to decipher the classes and selectors for myself. Even then, the template I discovered did not cover everything on the page, as I found out later.

Let me state this for the record right now: Nested Tables Are Fucking Horrible!!! Horrible for both site design and for retaining your sanity when editing them. Even with a template, I was forced to edit the colors by trial and error, since Myspace.com's account editor thought it would be great fun to delete all the comments the original author had left within the CSS, leaving me with no guide whatsoever. Because of all the nested tables, I had no clue what I was changing whenever I declared a new background color, for instance. Some random tables would change color, but others would not. This, in addition to the error-ridden code, created a situation where customizing the Profile Page was psychotically difficult at very best. After an entire hour of tweaking the CSS values, my profile page still did not look the way I wanted it to. So perhaps the horrible site designs are in some way attributable to Myspace.com, as it is so complex that even with CSS knowledge such as I have, Profile layouts are almost guaranteed to look like shit.

And that was enough. I am finished with Myspace.com. Although the "blog" portion is fairly easy to customize (and in fact offers customization options beyond what the other two sites presented), the Profile portion is excrutiatingly difficult, made even more so by the lack of any prominent tutorials on Myspace.com telling users how to edit this portion. Combined with the nasty, error ridden code and hideous layout (Nested Tables are Evil!), I can not and will not reccomend it for any reason.

Normally there would be a link somewhere on this page to where my "blog" is located, but with this site, I could not stand interacting with Myspace.com any longer than I had to. Thus, immediately after completing the upper portions of this review, I cancelled my account (View Screenshot). However, even with this there was difficulties, as the site gave me an error message (View Screenshot) after I clicked on "Cancel My Account". This happened three separate times, even after I logged out and then back in, and even now I still do not think the cancellation ever went through.

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