How myspace treats its users

So myspace is annoying. Don’t get me wrong. i have two accounts and over a thousand “friends” - but i hate how the site looks, works and exists. It is like the bastion of all i hate on the internet. Bad design, Bad usability and bad user relations. Myspace hates their users. They blame their users on their problems. I don’t think this is a good way to maintain their postion in the ever changing social network world.

For instance this last weekend(07/15/2005) someone had exploited flash and myspace to make a script that hijacked peoples pages and placed unwanted code in their “about me” section. It was a simple hijacking, using a known flash exploit/feature, exploited by malicious users and it worked. Myspace got mad and in response upgraded all their flash to flash 9. This is all fine, but what pissed me off was how they reacted to their users. After the weekend when you logged into myspace - they redirected you to a flash upgrade page. The text of the page read:

hey folks - we are moving myspace music players and video players to flash 9.0. flash 9 has security fixes so that people can't mess with you on myspace. if your 'about me' got screwed up this weekend, you could have been safe if you had flash 9 installed. here's an easy way to install it, go watch this dashboard video i posted last week. if you don't like dashboard, just watch any video in our video section, and you'll be prompted to install flash 9.

As you can see - myspace blames its users for their security issue. I mean - it is a pain in the ass when you allow users to post whatever they want. That is a really hard thing to manage and XSS stuff is hard to solve for and very hard to predict. However - it isn't the fault of the users that someone exploited a new flash exploit. hah. in fact i would say that it is the fault of myspace.

After this happened i started to look around and a lot of the language on myspace(the little “friendly” messages from tom, the notices and other user interaction) is all a bit passive aggressive. Its like a friend who you like but always blames you when things go wrong. hah. stupid myspace