So for Simuze we finally made an account on Myspace. It took me sometime due to the captcha’s which are almost unreadable, but after some attempts it worked. As of now you can find Simuze on MySpace by using this link. My first impression of Myspace:

Why for the love of <insert religious figure here> are people using this load of crap called Myspace!?

Its full of ads, the interaction is completely unclear and it looks like it was designed in the 1990’s. If that’s not enough than you should have a quick look at their terms relating to the content you as a user post on Myspace:

By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services.

I underlined part of these terms, because I want to point out that all your content may be used by these people. Legally. For any reason they see fit or in whatever way or shape they want (as described in their terms). I doubt however that this will really hold in court when they start using content from bands like this one in that way. That particular band can at least take action against Myspace if they don’t agree with their actions or terms. You and me, are a different story. We don’t have the means to counter the Rupert Murdoch empire. So I would advise every content creator to be extremely careful with Myspace (any musicians waking up?) and their ridiculous terms.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens with Simuze on Myspace. One thing is sure we won’t be uploading any content!

For me its sad to see something like Myspace becoming so widespread. I guess its all about mass and communication and not interaction, design, fairness or anything like that. Just mass and communication. As a web-developer, interaction designer and media activist this makes me sad.

p.s.: Guess I’m not the only one becoming sad of this. Mark of Vanilla Fame wrote a similar post about the horrible look and feel of Myspace and Openbusiness also mentioned the less than ideal terms.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 7:39 pm and is filed under geek, musica, politics, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.