MySpace irritates me. Perhaps more than any other living thing on this planet – if you can categorise this immensely popular social network site as ‘living’. There’s nothing wrong with the concept behind MySpace, but it’s the execution and evolution of MySpace pages, its content and page relationships that’s hideous. The design of members’ pages ranges from bad to hellish, the content components are bad, and the content itself is frequently full of ‘sub’-txt message jibberish pinging. It’s a seething mutating virus of awfulness worshipping itself through an orgy of incompetence. And some of my favourite musicians have their own pages. Spot the irony.

The New York Times has written about the unprofessionalism of MySpace, and there’s a website dedicated to the worst pages on the site.

One Slashdot user asks ‘does it really matter?’ Well, obviously not to the 60 million users of MySpace. Robert Scoble reckons it is popular because it’s not professional. I say it’s despite this. You can be professional and approachable. Otherwise, we’d all be staring at badly designed magazines, articles, advertisements and it wouldn’t make a difference. True, design isn’t everything. But in the case of MySpace there’s no design and little competent content. Those who have something to say write blogs, those who don’t use MySpace.

Ah, but what about those who can’t design and/or haven’t got the skills to develop and maintain blogs? That’s why there are hosted blogs. That’s why people publish themes. What about those who can’t pay for hosted blogs? Here’s the deal: spend a little more on on-line presence at the expense of some of the ephemeral materialistic piffle that gets written about on MySpace. In any case, WordPress is free.