The Naked Emperor

I know MySpace is the most popular spot on the web these days, along with YouTube and the various Google properties...

Networking sites are all the rage, along with some like Yahoo 360, Facebook, Frappr and MyBlogLog

But the granddaddy of them all is MySpace, which apparently anyone who is anyone has a MySpace page.

Why is MySpace so popular? Because it's popular, as I read somewhere a while back. It's a self-popularizing website - "Everybody has a MySpace page, so I have to, too."

Any band worth its salt has a MySpace page, they're not taken seriously until they do. And there are other examples.

But what nobody seems to want to talk about is how mind-numbingly ugly MySpace sites are...

I've been a web designer for 10 years, and have seen sites evolved from the ever-popular <blink></blink>'ing text to content crammed into every imaginable corner, to minimalist design and maximum interactivity.

But MySpace is so...it's just so badly designed to be laughable. Features are strewn haphazardly about, graphics and videos that people are encouraged to post force extra-wide screens requiring side-scrolling, topdown-scrolling, diagonal-scrolling, longways-scrolling and every scrolling imagineable. The color backgrounds are blinding and the text unreadable. Columns bump into each other and paragraphs of text overlap. Yet everyone continues to accept this as where you have to be.

It's too bad we as web consumers don't demand better from the sites we frequent. I personally can't stand visiting anyone's MySpace page because I know it's going to be an incoherent mess of animated graphics, unwanted indie bands (ok, that's my own prejudice there) and unreadable content.

This Emperor not only has no clothes, they're really, really, really ugly. And no one will tell him about it.