April 30, 2008

Years ago an explosion of traffic came my way when Myspace went down in the UK. There was a lot of bad information floating around. Ferodynamics became the forum of choice for play-by-play action with British Telecom. It wasn’t my intention, but from there Ferodynamics became an unofficial resource/support forum for social networks like Myspace. The questions started out simple.

Then it changed, users wanted more sophisticated information, more complex requests, they wanted to customize everything. Meanwhile, Facebook opened up and programmers dove in. The whole time I’m thinking it’s going to get ugly when Myspace opens up apps too! XHTML and CSS is one thing, but we’re talking apps now, Pandora’s box is open. To a wider range of problems, concerns, issues.

A group of MySpace employees are manually approving each new app. If the app isn’t improved, it’s placed into a “suspended” state, and its developers can’t work on it. “A big part of the developer community is not happy that they’ve been unable to fix or test their apps for over a day,” one anonymous developer tells me.

I can imagine Facebook is easy to code for, everyone’s page predictable, boxes in columns on a white background, like Microsoft Windows back in the 80s. Myspace is more random.

Update: Seems I was right, truthbox app is not working with some layouts.

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