Chen is specifically talking about a new redesign here, not the overall ability for MySpace users to customize everything.

What's so totally annoying about this is the UX people get overridden by the concerns of the 'business' people. Many companies I've worked with still have rather arbitrary distinctions which divide people and create antagonistic tendencies between teams. Really, truly, everyone is working on the same 'business' problems, just from different angles.

Treating UX people as not understanding 'business' is insulting. Not saying it's been done here explicitly, but as someone who's done a lot of development, I've been talked down to enough by people who think I don't understand 'business' or company X's particular 'business'. The only time I don't understand an aspect of the business needs is when those aspects are specifically withheld during meetings ("for strategic purposes", of course).

I think the UX people probably understand the 'business' of getting users to quit leaving myspace and start using it again - for the long term - better than any of the 'business' guys who can only measure success on daily or weekly ad sales charts. Not saying money and ad sales are bad, but this is a classic death spiral - increase page views (and possibly ad sizes) to squeeze a few extra bucks out of the remaining users before they leave two.

The same network effect of people using MySpace because all their friends did is going to be working in reverse as people quit using it because their friends quit using it too. The absolute first priority should be to keep those friends using MySpace, then devising strategies to get them to get their friends back.

All this assumes the true goal of the 'business' side of things is to have a growing profitable MySpace 5 years from now. I really suspect it's not.

That's because the incentives are completely screwed up (to put it in the nicest terms): more page views (no matter how these come about) = more ad revenue. So what do you expect many to do?

It's a sad state of affairs because the "business" folks are now resorting to more controversial and in-your-face material that is complete garbage much like cable news and other ratings whores on television. Think about the AOL memo that was allegedly leaked. That's what the internet is turning into all at the expense of high-quality content.

This wouldn't be a problem if everyone else didn't do it, but when you can't easily monetize online, now you even have the likes of the New York Times with huge display ads that scroll down to cover up most of your screen when you visit their home page. Disgusting. Someone needs to change this. I'm looking into it.

MySpace allowing CSS etc. in their profiles was initially a bug. Their code was just bad, not escaping user input.

They were on such a growth trajectory, and users loved being able to customize their pages, that they made it into an official feature.

I've heard anecdotally that Plenty of Fish intentionally does something similar on their search results. The user thumbnails are generally low quality and/or squashed into the wrong aspect ratio. What I heard from someone who talked to him about it is they tried fixing it (cropping instead of resizing, higher image quality, etc), but it resulted in fewer click-throughs (and fewer ad impressions) so they changed it back.

MySpace intentionally delegated a good chunk of the UI/UX to the individual users. This was a mistake.

It's not a mistake if you do it right.

They could have done it like Wordpress does ... i.e. here's dozens of templates to choose from; then you can customize the colors, and the banner, and you can choose your preferred right-side widgets.

This is actually one thing that's annoying me about Facebook - all pages are boring AND filed with tons of shitty statuses and app invites ; I don't bother logging in anymore, unless I get a comment or something to one of my own status updates (that's coming in from my Twitter's iPhone Client).

I think this was one of the reasons MySpace originally took off. It was Geocities++. Once the current concept of social networking was adopted they should have started restricting user creativity...

Agreed.

Allow a lot of customization and freedom, but don't allow them to break the basic contract of civility and the neighborliness of not having sound play on a page, or a ton of animated garbage that slows everything down and no organization whatsoever.

I mean, we don't let the average driver design roads or cars, so why would we let them completely rewrite a webpage? If they're actually good at it, they should be able to express that talent though, in some fashion.

If you don't give people an outlet for something they'll find or make one! But it's a fine balance. And finding it takes talent too.

Even twitter does that! Yet we are yet to see horrendous profile pages on Twitter. Reasons:

1) Twitter crowd is "relatively sober" (no data to prove this).

2) Twitter does not go all out on the options. The tools are limited to a huge extent with a majority of page still covered by tweets esp in the new design. Hence less chance of the user to play their part.

I could be wrong, but Twitter doesn't allow custom CSS, cursor changes, scroll tags, and it doesn't let you blast horrible horrible music in the faces of their readers. That, to me, is a plus.

It's a little weird since I prefer to give the users as much control as allowable when I write applications for them... but this has shown me that sometimes great power is not always treated with great responsibility :)

Twitter lets you change only the colours and the background. The rest of the page elements are the same across every profile.

MySpace let you change anything and everything, because it allowed custom HTML and CSS. There are plenty of examples where entirely different types of profiles were used, including Flash ones, which could be used with little more than copying and pasting HTML and CSS, e.g. http://www.flaashy.com/index.php?m=Layouts&e=view&id....

I have seen some pretty poorly done twitter pages. At least they didn't take it to the level that myspace did with flaming text, music, videos, pictures, and embedded objects all on one page sometimes playing simultaneously with no visible controls.

And most of the interaction with twitter is rarely done with the userpage. I visit twitter.com, maybe, 20 times a month. The rest of the time its used through an intelligently designed app.

Twitter profiles can get pretty tacky.

The difference is that such customization is for the individual and rarely seen by others, whereas with myspace such customization was on a landing page that a lot of other people would see. It's also much less limited than the degree of awfulness you could inflict with myspace.

On a somewhat related note, I 'got' how/why people were so attracted to MySpace in the first place with the 'personal customization' aspect - my own background, colors, etc. But I have to say it would have been even better with one or both of the following options:

1. A toggle to disable a person's styles to a default.

2. An option of defining my own style for viewing others' pages.

I just went to a friend's page (after having not been on myspace in > 2years) and it was 100% unreadable. Doing a 'select all' on the entire page made some of the text readable, barely. Ugh.

Dont forget MySpace was THE site out there when doing these things was considered the best business plan. Hence why Ning and a few other sites like it were also popular. However that was a LONG time go and things have changed alot since then.

Designing for the best user experience is the same as designing for revenue.

For most users I suspect it's better than Quora's, actually.

I had to chuckle when I saw the domain this story was submitted from. On one hand, the technical aspects of Quora are quite nifty. But the interaction process is one big 'wtf'. Adding new topics to your feed is baffling. In fact for a while I didn't even realize there was a personalizd feed, I thought the majority of questions were just about Steve Jobs (must have been cause ceoSteveJobs is on my Twitter account, which I used to sign in). Other details, like wanting to post a question in anonymous mode, have inobvious answers. It's a shambles (although I suppose it's still early days, and really the content is the important thing).

This is a good example of how A/B testing the wrong things can kill your product.