An Experiment of a Webmaster

When I was first introduced to myspace I hated it. After thinking back, I realised that I was extremely jealous. When ever I criticise it, I think about a large community web site that I developed and realise I suffer from many of the things I complain about too. I don’t know what was really going through Toms mind when he made MySpace, but I can give you a little insight into the development of my online rpg, The Dark Grimoire.

I originally created the website as a bet/pride/dare kinda thing. I was in the military doing a pretty boring job and ocassionally we’d be just surfing the web. Everyone was hooked on the stupid simplest game in the world, Kings of Chaos. Its probably one of the first real sucesses in game viral marketing. Its basicly just allocating resources you accumulate over the hour and waiting until you get more next hour, then using them to battle others. Of coiurse, being a good coder, I saw the simplistic nature of this and was mad it did so well when my stuff never got visitors.

In one of my ranting sessions when I was whining about how I could make a better game than this, one of the senior people told me to just do it and quit my whining. Its at that point that it clicked in my head that he was right and it was the perfect project to keep my skills up to date.

I’m a good programmer, but at the time I was no where near a good graphics person. The original site was a tables based layout and very ugly colors. I still had people signing up. Lots of people. Over time this layout has turned into something not completely hideous. I’d still like to get a good layout person in to help me make it look good, but its a huge step up from where it used to be.

Everything up to this point in the blog entry was just background to put you guys into a mindset of someone who creates something simple that turns into something complex. Tom probably started the same way. To me it looks like the back end system was focused on way more heavily than the frontent, and as it grew it got harder to manage.

Now that myspace is owned by someone with a LOT more money, they can go back and fix a lot of the interface stuff. Unfortunately it will be very hard for them to correct the coding on the profile pages, due to all the custom layouts and comment boxes. Since the myspace profile page is the furthest possible place away from standards compliance, all the myspace pages are pretty much hacks. The CSS designs require the tags to all be in the EXACT place and nested the exact way that they are on the page. If myspace changes that even a little, the profiles will stop working. The profiles looking good is one of the “social” aspects of the social web site, so they can’t risk alienating their users, but at one point I feel it will NEED to be done.

Now the point of this whole post is really to say that if you’re creating a technically different idea, its ok to put it out there with it not looking that good since people are likely to stick with it if its really that cool. Just make sure you aren’t just slapping an interface together and releasing too soon, because it WILL come back to haunt you.

Also, anything targeted towards teens that allows pictures, blinking text, and flirting, could possibly become a hit through just dumb luck.