The common assumption among programming types about MySpace is that the system started off as somebody’s pet project and quickly mushroomed beyond the programmers’ control. Rather than cooling off growth to create a better infrastructure, the MySpace folks opted for growth at any costs. As a result, we end up with the buggy, unreliable usability nightmare that is MySpace today. Now, it’s assumed, the programmers and sysadmins are scrambling to play catchup.

This article pretty much confirms these assumptions. According to the article, MySpace started out as a ColdFusion-based project — and while ColdFusion is ridiculously easy to program, any developer can tell you it’s got a reputation (deserved or not) for being a little slow and resource-heavy on the performance scale. So as they’ve grown, MySpace has been moving to Microsoft’s ASP.Net and relying on emulators to port some of the older code over.

One can’t really blame MySpace for such logic. It’s the kind of hot-air logic that propelled companies like Pets.com to the stratosphere back in the ’90s and made a ton of people oodles and oodles of cash. It’s Web 1.0 thinking. Using such Web 1.0 thinking, MySpace has quickly vaulted to become the most visited site on the Internet and gotten snatched up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in the process.

But as a result, they’ve built on an unsustainable foundation. They’ve made the classic gamble that short-term gain will trump long-term stability. And like so many Web 1.0 companies that came before them, MySpace is headed for a big, clumsy fall. Here’s why.

• Easy come, easy go. The base audience for MySpace consists of teenagers and folks in their twenties. That’s not to say this is the only demographic using MySpace, but that’s the core audience. These people flocked to the service for the same reasons young people flock to anything: it was new, it was cool, it was free, and everyone they knew was doing it. Give them an alternative that’s newer, cooler, better functioning, and more reliable — not to mention backed by big corporate dollars — and they’ll flock there just as quickly.
• Insecurity. Recently someone came up with the grand idea of distributing malicious code through a security vulnerability in embedded QuickTime videos. Folks have been taking advantage of CSS and HTML quirks to hack MySpace almost since the place began. More and more people are complaining about hacked profiles and hijacked identities. MySpace has demonstrated time and again that they’re behind the curve when it comes to security. So I think it’s highly likely that at some point in the near future, we’ll see a series of successful crippling attacks on MySpace that will send people running in a panicky exodus.
• Slowing pace of innovation. Adapt or die, that’s the unofficial motto of the Internet. And unlike, say, Google, which continues to pump out features and applications by the gallon, MySpace has remained largely sedentary for the past year. They released a lamentable, old-school IM client and better video integration, but otherwise the system is pretty much the same as it was 18 months ago. As MySpace’s technical problems grow and their folks spend more and more time just keeping up with demand, they’re going to fall even further behind.
• Facebook. If you want to see an example of a MySpace-like program that actually works, look no further than Facebook. It’s user-friendly, it’s popular, and best of all, it’s reliable. The service’s big handicap at this point is that it doesn’t allow nearly the level of customization that MySpace does. But that’s only one major partnership with Yahoo! away (assuming Yahoo! finally bites the bullet and makes a deal with them already).
• Where are the premium services? I’m not entirely familiar with the intricacies of MySpace’s business model, but from the looks of things, they’re entirely dependent on advertising. And as Yahoo! has discovered, that’s not a stable strategy for the long term. Why hasn’t MySpace tapped into the burgeoning third-party market of MySpace website pimpers and added services like that of their own? Where are the premium clubs and the premium band promotion services?
• “Why change?” attitude. A former MySpace VP of operations is quoted in the article as saying: “when you look at the result, it’s hard to argue that what we did with the interface and navigation was bad. And why change it, when you have success?” Few technology companies have succeeded in the long run with the mantra “why change?” It won’t fly on the Internet, where the barriers to migrating to another free service are absolutely nil.

So there you have a few reasons off the top of my head why I think MySpace is headed for a fall. This doesn’t mean that they’ll disappear entirely. After all, Compuserve is still around, and America Online will probably hang on for awhile too even after they’ve recklessly thrown away their customers. But neither are any more than a shell of their former selves, and I suspect that MySpace will eventually meet that fate too.

Is it inevitable? Well, every Goliath falls eventually. That’s just the nature of the universe. But it’s up to MySpace just how far away and how graceful that fall is.

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(Related reading: see my previous rants on Why Does MySpace Suck So Badly? and MySpace Spam or Clever Marketing?)

MySpace is far and away the most popular of these types of services. According to Alexa, MySpace ranks only below Yahoo and Google in terms of popularity on the web. If you’re curious, you can view my page at http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman.

Here’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having:

• Member search doesn’t work. Try searching for members using multiple criteria, and watch the search go splat. (Then again, Yahoo’s member search has been broken for years and nobody seems eager to fix it.)
• Importing contacts doesn’t work. I tried importing my online address books from Yahoo, GMail, and AIM. MySpace said it sent out a dozen or so invites. It didn’t, and I had to redo the whole thing by hand.
• Instant messaging doesn’t didn’t work. I tried sending a friend a message just to see what it would do, only to receive a very unprofessional-looking error message stating that the instant messaging was out of commission.
• Cross-posting from WordPress doesn’t work. I have managed to get this working with LiveJournal (http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com if you’re curious) using a nice little plugin I found on the web. There used to be one of these for MySpace, but the plugin developer gave up because MySpace kept mucking with the API.
• Reporting spam doesn’t work. This morning I received friend requests from kinkymonica, flirtymonica, and luvymonica. How do you report these friend requests as the porn spam they so obviously are? You can’t.
• Approving your friends doesn’t work. I’m currently staring at my “approve/deny your friends” queue, which states that I’m looking at “Listing 1-6 of 6.” Only about an inch away, however, there’s another column that says “1 of 1.” And below, there’s nothing listed. Do I have five phantom friends? (Actually, that would explain a lot of things…)

To add to the functional problems, the site is full of the worst kind of design heresy. Boxes float around the page with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The default icons look like rejects from your old Windows 3.1 installation. Navigation seems to float around the screen in illogical places, to the point where the only button I can rely on is the browser’s Back button. Things get even worse when users start mucking with their MySpace designs and adding polls and plug-ins and garish animated GIFs. You get stuck with endless pages that take forever to load and are impossible to read.

The worst sin of all is that MySpace plays multimedia files without asking you first. My first reaction to any page that starts blaring music or video at me is to immediately click the Back button and run like hell. In order to turn off the music at MySpace, you need to quickly scan the screen for the multimedia player — which is in a different place on each page — and click the Stop or Pause button. But even then, your preference doesn’t stick, so if you go to a different site and come back later, the music starts blaring again. (Only this time it starts playing faster because the page is in your browser cache.)

Recently MySpace attempted to ameliorate this by adding a preference you can set to turn off the automatic music. Surprise: it doesn’t always work.

The question that I have is that why hasn’t MySpace made full use of open standards, the most successful example of social networking on the web to date? Take a look at the source code for your MySpace page, and it’s a mess. No DTD at the top, style sheet links embedded in the middle of the body, tables mixed with DIVs mixed with IFRAMEs willy-nilly.

And I’m not just talking about open standards determined by some committee in Switzerland, but web design standards that have won the long, hard Darwinian slog in the marketplace. Navigational sidebars. Underlined links. Fluid layouts that don’t break on different screen resolutions. Different colors for visited links.

The popularity of MySpace is enough for me to reevaluate all of the design credos I hold so dear. If such a horrible website as this can become a cultural phenomenon and literally change the way American teenagers live their lives, then what hope is there for web standards?

My only consolation is that the Firefox AdBlock extension works just fine on MySpace. Not only that, but Userscripts.org has a bevvy of useful Greasemonkey scripts to turn bad MySpace pages into — well, less bad MySpace pages.