Myspace-Customizer

Press Release:

Nottingham, England, December 31, 2006. Myspace-Customizer.com is a new resource site created to allow users at Myspace.com to customize their profiles. According to the creator of Customizer, Mr. Singh (I suppose he only has one handle like Dr. Phil), “the goal of this new site is to provide users with high quality free resources, without bombarding them with cheap ads”.

According to the press release, the site has a wide range of layouts for Myspace members to modify their profile space. There are also supposed to be multiple generator and code additions in the future. Myspace is currently rated the 5^th most popular web site in the world, according to Alexa, so at least one claim from this release proved to be accurate.

Is it Really?

I joined Myspace, so that we might get a first look at this new addition aimed at ???quality versus quantity???. In fairness, Myspace is actually a pretty nice site, with good features. However, this latest addition falls way short of the press release hype. As we have seen before with supposed 2.0 additions, many developers are simply spamming us with facsimiles.

There are actually 6 background layout categories available currently:

Film Layouts ??? 9 (and some of these are really cool!)

Hip Hop Layouts ??? 10

Romantic Layouts ??? 7

Scenic Layouts ??? 7 (nice)

Sports Layouts ??? 3 sets of NBA, NFL, and Soccer (basically every team)

TV Layouts ??? 7

These are high quality backgrounds, but there are not that many to choose from as of yet. The problem with these backgrounds (especially my really cool 007 choice) is that once the code is placed in the user???s profile, the current page fields hide most of the image completely. Also, you will note in the image below that the 007 background is obscured at the top by a huge banner offering FREE dinner for two if you can answer Olsen twins trivia! I wonder if this is their estimation of what we consider high quality content. I mean, it does not take a rocket scientist to think of initially putting NO advertisements on a user ???Customized??? profile page!

So far, the generators mentioned amount to two cute text generators that can make a variety of scrolling or static artsy text. The problem I found with this, even though I like cute colored letters, is that the fields where the code can be added are not places one would want giant blue scrolling cutsies to appear! I don???t think that moving banners and sparkly text is what most of us have in mind for 21^st century user enhancements!

One of the last features I took the time to look at was the new toolbar option. I was not ready to make Myspace my home page (yet), so I can only say that the tool bar looked functional and similar to 100 others we have seen. I attempted to navigate to the links page in order to look for free layouts, but was bombarded with several redirects and pop ups in route, and decided to end my visit.

I am always optimistic when I read a new press release, in the hopes that something really worth while will be announced. Web 2.0 has unlimited potential, and I suppose that some ’spin’ is to be expected. I really think that we should all really expect more from the people that we keep in business. I truly hope that Myspace gets the ball rolling on this project. My early 2007 prediction for developers who sell us a pig-in-a-poke, eventual extinction!