When people think of good design on the web, they normally stick MySpace right at the bottom of the list. Unfortunately for people who appreciate nicely designed websites and portals, MySpace decided to throw out a news portal that would mix some Web 2.0 juice into the equation. There are many things wrong with this idea (some were mentioned at Mashable) but here are my thoughts:
- MySpace users are teenagers and young adults who are into music, not regurgitated Associated Press articles.
- When people want civil discourse and intelligent conversation, they don’t think of MySpace.
- The news portal business is overly-crowded as it is, why enter it?
Another pet peeve is that permalinks to content have a frameset toolbar at the top. This is similar to how Spivot used to behave, but they recently took that “feature” away which is great to see. MySpace, don’t hijack!