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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.