The MySpace Wish List

There's a really good write up about a new profile editor called SnapLayout over at TechCrunch - head over to read the full article.

http://crunchbase.com/company/snaplayout 

The SnapLayout editor is pretty straight forward. You log in with your MySpace credentials, and can use a WYSIWYG editor to make drag-and-drop changes to all the major features of your profile. You can select a pre-made template or start customizing changes on your own. The editor lets you move around boxes, use Flickr photos for a backdrop, adjust text size and style, or even change the entire color pallet of your profile (i.e. summer and winter themes). It can also add a slide show of all your uploaded photos to the header of your profile.

Apologies for the quietness around here recently - real-life caught up with me…

Thankfully, Jasmine has done a lot research recently on some of the irks of MySpace and sent in a fantastic email full of ideas - I've posted the contents below and we can all hope it inspires the owners of MySpace to improve their services for all our benefits. 

Profile Privacy

Currently there are two options for myspace users. Your profile can be visible, or private.

Some users aren’t aware of this.
Having your profile set to private simply means only your friends can see your coding/ photos/ heading and your blog. (although your default photo is still displayed for anyone to see) Randoms who view your page only see your default photo, the heading above it, and the default contact table. (the box that says ‘add to friends’ and ‘send message’ etc.)

•From the feedback I’ve had so far, the biggest concerns relating to privacy are photos and comments.

Many people who have an open profile have coding in their profile to hide their comments as it is. (or a link to view the comments, like I do)

And I have a friend who doesn’t want randoms to be able to see her photos. But she wants her friends to see them. Her profile is private, but randoms can still see her default photo.

I think when you upload a photo to your album, you should be able to decide who sees it

Eg, you have to tick one of these options:

‘allow this photo to be viewed by everyone’
‘allow this photo to be viewed only by my friends’
‘allow this photo to be viewed only by me’

I’m not sure what would happen when randoms view your album. Would they see a blank photo saying ‘only this users friends may view this photo’? Or would there be no indication of hidden photos?

Why is this so important? Because sometimes there are certain photos of yourself that you dont want randoms to see. Like cleavage shots or emo pics. But you dont exactly want your whole album and profile private.

Eg for me, I love people being able to see my profile because I put alot of work into it. But I don’t want shitheads like dean (someone who keeps harassing me ) to see my pics because they make fun of them.

Read the rest of this post »

by Michelle MacPhearson

Since one of the great benefits of having a MySpace account is making friends, it is important to know how to accept or deny an add new friend request. There are factors to consider in making a decision whether to accept or reject a possible friend. The next section will talk about some of these factors, and also on how to accept or reject a new possible friend.

Read the rest of this post »

Hey everyone!  Many thanks for all the cool ideas that have been submitted to me, though a lot are very similar, ie. getting rid of or changing section headers, which sadly cannot be done… yet!  I'm really gladdened by all the feedback.

Since I started the site a short few months ago (which now has a Google Page Rank of 3!), the amount of time I can give has reduced due to other real life stuff - so I'm seeing if there are any people out there who would like to write up some of the wishes for the site and generally add to the place.  If you're interested, please drop me a line via the contact form and let me know your ideas and skills - treat it like a job interview 

Look forward to your submissions.

Tim 

I like the use of bulletins to a point - you get a varied selection from friends and people you’ve added - but I would like the ability to be able to choose who I get bulletins from. For example, I have Kevin Smith and the Suicide Girls on my friends list, and don’t I know it, I get half-a-dozen bulletins a week from them promoting themselves; which wouldn’t be bad if I was that interested, but I’m not and I’m unsure whether to delete them from my friends list.

So I wish for some control over my bulletins!

The MySpace Blog Editor allows you to post directly from within Firefox to your MySpace blog aswell as save notes, drag and drop formatted text from webpages, handle images and much more.

I haven’t tried this, as I tend to rely on the MySpace ToolBar, which can add some functionality to blogging and Bulletins. Let me know how it works, and I’ll submit your reviews.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3229/

by Sean Cash

So many guys have asked me lately, Cash, how can I get a girl off myspace to my house?. Many guys don't realize that online game is actually much, much, harder than real life game. Online the rules are different and if you don't know the rules you will fall flat on your face. So how do you get a girl off myspace you ask? I will tell you the easiest fool proof way I've taught guys to do it. It doesn't take much effort or luck really, its about knowing the environment of myspace dating thoroughly before you get involved. Read the rest of this post »

If you’ve spent any time on MySpace, the most popular website in the U.S, you’ll have probably noticed that the profiles without a good profile picture have few friends. MySpace being what it is, a place of social networking typically is very personal in nature. People want to see the real you and they want to know that there’s a real person on the other side of their computer screen.

One of the ways to get a lot of involvement in your profile is to upload a good variety of pictures. The more fun and interesting pictures you upload to your profile the better. People love to comment on them and its fun to see what everyone has to say.
Read the rest of this post »

Lauren asked if she could delete all her blog entries in one go - doesn’t seem that you can, so for her it’s going to be a long tedious process of clicking the remove entry link and awaiting the page to load for the next remove.

It would also be nice to be able to move the blog from MySpace to another blogging system, like WordPress or MovableType or vice-versa if a user so desired.

So the wish is:
Make editing your blog posts easier, as the professional and semi-professional systems do

“I would like to know which friend you lost when you loose a friend. It’s annoying to figure out who deleted you or if they deleted their myspace.”

Kim

I agree with this, when you’re no longer “friends”, it would be nice to know who’s leaving if it’s amicable - if they really don’t want you to know then they can disappear. Some sort of leaving friends section possibly or a section of account activity.

It’s very easy to start your own group on Myspace and the benefits of starting your own group are many. For one, as the founder of a group and the moderator you have control over the rules of your group. You set whether you’d like your group to be public or private as well as how the group operates.

The best reason to form your own group is in its ability to get you exposure. Groups are a great marketing vehicle to get your point across. They can enable you to get in on the best kind of marketing, word of mouth. As the moderator you can begin to create a relationship of trust with others in the group and speak directly to them.
Read the rest of this post »

One of the best ways to find people of like minded interest is through the use of Myspace groups. Myspace has an amazing variety of people with an immense amount of different interests. In fact, there are over two million different groups on Myspace. With all of the different groups you’re sure to be able to find what you’re looking for.

To get involved with groups and be able to discuss issues regarding the groups interests you must first join. Upon joining a group you’ll than be able to participate in conversations and post pictures to the group.
Read the rest of this post »

One thing that bugs me, is if you add a new friend request, you have to go to a separate process to send them a preliminary message introducing yourself (if needed) - Personally I think this should be part of the request process, where when you click add, there is also a message box to say hello.

I’ve had a few rejections from people who didn’t know who I was, so had to go through a laborious message routine to get added

Jono sent in a link to a Grease Monkey script that will allow you to remove a persons over enthusiastic styling, so you can then at least read the page in a basic fashion.

UserScripts

I haven’t tried it myself, as I usually use Firefox’s inbuilt Page Style chooser, so do let me know how you get on with it.

Quick sketch from the Saturday Night Live crew on MySpace - you know it's arrived if it appears here 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - MySpace, the wildly popular online teen hangout, said on Friday it will make its first move into the digital music business by selling songs from nearly 3 million unsigned bands.

MySpace is the latest company to try to take on Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store, but unlike many other start-up rivals, it already boasts 106 million users, as well as the backing of parent company News Corp.

 Full story here »

Thanks to the Digg effect it seems, MYSpace have fixed a giant hole that could allow anyone to view private profiles!

So it looks like now that this backdoor was on DIGG.COM, Myspace has fixed this huge, gaping security hole - Kudos to Myspace for that. But lets not forget that this little 'bug' has been in the wild and people have been using it since at least April 2006.

 You can read the rest of the article here:  The Grown Up Geek

When I first started on MySpace, the first thing I did like everyone else, was fill in the sections in your profile!

Your Header, About Me, I’d Like to Meet, Interests, etc.

Only problem is, it’s all a bit too similar to everyone else - so the first thing I did was find a workaround so I could put my own section headers on - how I did it is in my post about section headers, coincidentally enough - but for everyone else, it would be nice to be able to rename your section headers to something more meaningful to how you want to put across your profile.

Petsey5 sent in a wish asking for the ability to rename your top friends.

I can see his point, there’s nothing worse than seeing a load of HTML symbols with some abstract saying, especially if the picture has changed leaving you going “Who’s that?”

Personally I think a slightly more useable feature would be a Personal Alias - so you can see whatever your friend has called themselves this week, with a sub heading of your personal name (or note even) or even the other way around with your alias followed by their name depending on your preference.

Wish MySpace would disallow opacity from the CSS allowed in profiles - as much as I like to push forward CSS and it’s creative uses, I’ve come across far too many MySpace profiles that abuse these effects, so that you cannot see any of the profile due to the transparent tables and images - the effect also slows the browser window down, which can be a pain if the page is graphic heavy.
I wish they would remove or limit these CSS functions:

mozz-opacity
opacity  &
filter:opacity