Myspace.com – Reasons why it sucks
Social Networking has become common place in most people’s everyday lives. It seems almost everyone has a Myspace, Facebook, and/or other social networking accounts. These social networks like Myspace allow people to communicate with people they do and do not know. In my opinion however, Myspace has taken a turn for the worst in the last few years.
When Newscorp bought Myspace, I figured they would clean it up a little bit. Afterall, after the first few years of Myspace’s existence, it was hot and well taken care of. Myspace then suffered from what all sites of its kind suffer from, and that is spam bots, fake profiles, viruses, and other useless junk. I figured Newscorp would have the money and manpower to clean Myspace up. This in turn would lead to a much better user experience. However, that just simply has not happened. Its quite sad really.
The real kicker for me was when a worthless piece of garbage Lori Drew used Myspace to create a fake profile. She then used this fake profile to mess with the mind of young Meagan Meier who had some mental problems. This young girl ended up killing herself. The sad part is Drew got off. The woman should be in prison. Drew used a computer instead of a hatchet, but that poor little girl is dead just the same. My heart goes out to the Meier family. your in my prayers.
Myspace has also had more bad incidents and publicity over the years of being used for various forms of online stalking and harassment. This has caused it to come under the fire from many internet security professionals, and privacy rights advocates. I have a Myspace account, but I hardly ever use it. Facebook, while not perfect either, is far better than Myspace.
Myspace is an internet criminals dream. They know that most people will click on anything. They also know it is very easy to get someone to click on a link in their profile, bullentin, etc that leads to some sort of malware dropper to get into the users system. Linux users don’t have to worry about this, but Windows users are definitely at risk.
According to Google Safe Browsing, the service used by Firefox and Google to protect users from Malicious sites, Myspace.com has 67 scripting exploits, 6 trojans, and 5 worms as of 10-22-2009. This means at any time you could visit a profile or page, and if your not patched its instant ownage.
Myspace in its current form sucks, and needs some major fixing. One of the first things that needs to be fixed with Myspace is the Themes/Code insertion. Why allow someone who has absolutely no idea about coding or scripting just be able to copy and paste any type of coding script they want into their pages? This is recipe for disaster. This just makes the problem all the more worse. It makes it where you can never trust a profile page. This is the reason I always use NoScript Extension for Firefox and disable scripting and plug-ins globally for Firefox on Myspace.
All the useless junk people put on their Myspace profiles actually slow the site down to no end, even on a 6 mb cable connection. Myspace needs to redesign their site, and make a good user interface. They need to take lessons from their biggest competitor which is Facebook. This would make Myspace a much more user friendly, and safe environment for its users.
Until Myspace quits allowing folks to flood their profile pages with useless junk, some of it malicious, and neuters adding all these junk themes and other garbage, I can’t take Myspace seriously. Myspace has become so watered down that a person needs an intellectual lobotomy in order to use the service. That in itself is quite sad really.
