I’ve been trying to cross-post some of my blog posts on MySpace. Why do I bother, you may ask? Frankly, it’s probably because, deep down inside, I’m a narcissist and an exhibitionist, and I want to expose myself to as large a population as possible, and fact of the matter is, everyone and their mom seems to be on MySpace.

But Rupert Murdoch and his minion Tom don’t make it easy. First off, there is absolutely no API for posting to a MySpace blog. There have been previous attempts at creating a MySpace blogging client, but News Corp purposefully breaks them by intermittently changing (and obfuscating) their design. Part of the rationale is that this helps stem the tide of spam. (Damn those fembots.) But it feels very Orwellian. After all, all they really would have to do to prevent spammers from taking over the blog space completely is simply to rate-limit posting. After all, no legitimate blogger needs to post something every 2 seconds.

Secondly, the generated code is extraordinarily atrocious. It looks like a bunch of monkeys coded the site. Or maybe a drunken AI. Your blog entries are embedded in a set of nested tables. Barf. I hope none of the folks who work on this crap consider themselves web designers. Because if this crap is in your portfolio, I guarantee no one in their right mind will hire you. (You should count your blessings that there are plenty of insane people out there with money to spend.)

Seriously, though. I spent about half an hour trying to make my MySpace blog slightly less vomiting-inducing. Looking at the HTML source code made me feel very dirty at the end. MySpace developers seem to have a religious fervor towards breaking every sane convention for coding in HTML . (Seriously. Look at how they tag the subject line of the blog entry so that it ends up including the categories and your mood indicator. Barf. Barf x 2. WTF?!?!) Use of the <br> element abounds. Blank spacer GIFs are everywhere.

What I find remarkable is that you can actually use CSS to fix some of these atrocities. To a degree. (What you really need is an XSL transformer. Or a brainwashing machine like in “A Clockwork Orange” so that these bastards MySpace developers will learn how to avoid coding like idiots.) I feel very accomplished after inserting all sorts of kludgery so that my mirrored blog posts look semi-sane.

It’s little things like this that make me believe that Facebook is going to make MySpace completely irrelevant. One of these days, there will be more fake people on MySpace than real.

Facebook makes it trivial to mirror your blog onto your profile. All you have to do is use the “Notes” FB app to import your RSS or Atom feed. Facebook also respects the adage that “It’s all about the content!” While you don’t have any freedom to change the look-and-feel of Facebook the way you can screw around with MySpace, this also prevents you from creating absolutely disgusting profile pages, with music that you can’t stop from playing. (Seriously, the average MySpace profile looks like a personal website from around 1997. I’m amazed that no one used the <blink> tag.) In the meantime, due to Facebook’s app framework, you can put almost any sort of content on your profile page. In contrast, on MySpace, the best you can really do is embed Flash. This tends to make scrolling though the average MySpace profile absolute torture, even on relatively up-to-date machines.

I really don’t understand it, though. I mean, Rupert Murdoch and News Corp have gigatons of cash. I don’t understand why they can’t manage to hire semi-competent programmers.