Of all social networking websites, Myspace is currently one of the largest and most popular ones on the internet.  The majority of the users are aged teen up through the mid 20's. 

The concept of Myspace was to provide individuals who are not technically savvy a spot on the internet where they could express themselves and present information about their interests, their work, or anything else that they wanted to "put out there" about themselves.

The concept was actually brilliant at the time, and it filled a niche market made up of consumers who were interested in having a website, but lacked any sort of technical knowledge like html or other web programming languages in order to do it.  Therefore whatever structure Myspace used as its foundation would need to start with a default page which users could then easily modify without knowing the various internet programming languages.

However, while the concept filled an important niche and allowed a very large number of internet users to stake their claim within the ether of the internet, the execution of the Myspace concept failed in many respects.  Despite the general success of Myspace over the last several years, these drawbacks and weaknesses of Myspace are creating a slowing of that success.  Unless those weaknesses and drawbacks are dealt with at some point in the near future, the fate of Myspace could simply be the same fate of all other teen fads throughout history.

The major deficiencies of Myspace include:

• Poor design
• Difficult to customize
• Excess spamming of public profiles
• Inherent dangers for children and teens

Some of these problems are shared among most of the social networking sites similar to Myspace - however Myspace is becoming well known for its design flaws and customization difficulty.

Poorly Designed

Even after many years of being in operation, Myspace still offers an appearance of an amateur, low-budget website.  The standard Myspace page is terribly designed and visually unappealing.  Overall the font, backgrounds, and layout is disjointed and mismatched. The overall page formatting atrocious.

A number of new software packages have provided folks who are not technically savvy the ability to develop their own highly customized websites that feature beautiful artwork, well coordinated colors and text, and easy methods to update website content.  As these software packages advance and web design and publishing becomes much easier, the demand for Myspace pages is going to plummet significantly - unless Myspace can reinvent itself as a valuable, efficient, and aesthetically-pleasing web space.

Difficult to Customize

The entrance of blogs on the internet scene are starting to give Myspace a run for its money.  Primarily older users of Myspace are starting to abandon it for the blogosphere which, after the initial setup, is tremendously easy to customize, upgrade, and edit.  Even for users with no technical abilities - updating and maintaining a blog is extremely simple.  The same simply can not be said for a Myspace page.

Myspace pages are now recognized by internet users as outdated and appear as older webpages left behind by the advance of internet technology.  Amateur bloggers can now easily run a blog that features beautiful images, borders, background, and matching text and borders - all highly customized to suit the needs users without any programming skills required.  Myspace, in its current form, simply can not compete.

Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine, told Baseline Magazine in 2007 that many parts of the MySpace application are terribly inefficient - where the process to customize a user's site requires a multitude of clicks and page views for the simplest of tasks.

When MySpace was considered a startup - users were much more sympathetic to the bugs and technical problems that MySpace suffered from.  However now that MySpace has matured and should have advanced to a level of professional web hosting and technical expertise - users are no longer going to be willing to accept amateur customization options and poor design options.

Too Much Spam

Because all Myspace pages are essentially very public profiles - spammers have learned to take advantage of this and actively spam the Myspace messaging system with spam of every shape and size.  Most MySpace users agree that the spam problem on MySpace is significant.  It is one of the most common complaints from MySpace users.  This issue should be the number one priority for MySpace developers to improve the site into a social networking site that is a valuable and useful tool for people to meet and collaborate.  Spam can cause a messaging system to become virtually unusable if it is not dealt with.

Unregulated and Dangerous

The potential of social networking sites is tremendous.  People with a multitude of private and professional interests and hobbies are now able to communicate and collaborate with people from around the globe who share common interests.  This can tremendously increase productivity and speeds up the process of conducting research.  It helps people across the country to communicate and work together in ways that were never possible before social networking sites provided a platform for these kinds of communications and collaboration.

However, a large majority of users on MySpace are children aged less than 18 years old.  These are elementary and high school children who post personal profiles and information about themselves - not realizing that there are a number of people wandering the internet as predators of children.  MySpace in particular has become one of the most significant hunting grounds for such predators. 

It is important to recognize that websites that are created for children, like the popular children's social networking site Webkinz, features a number of important security features that protect children.  For example, there is no direct messaging system where outside users can directly message a child who is online.  There is also no way for outside users to chat with your child.  Additionally, parents are emailed and can log in and monitor their child's usage of the website.

MySpace, on the other hand, provides young children and teens open communication with users from the outside world.  This creates a tremendously dangerous situation for the teens and pre-teens that have made MySpace one of the most popular social networking sites among this age group.  The problem is severe enough that MySpace finally hired a security chief due to the complaints, and law enforcement actively monitors MySpace for predators.  Clearly, a public social networking site that is as unregulated as this should be for adults - not for young children. 

The Future of MySpace