I know it has been a long time since Friendster had become a customizable social networking site. It all started with a plain Friendster look then there came the themes, then customizable layouts, then there came a time when you can embed anything on Friendster, you name it, music, movies, flash objects (swf), games, plugins etc. on your profile, one someone’s testimonials or comments.

Well that was a very good jump for Friendster, because I think the competition between social networking sites have been very incomparable, but that big leap was way too early for novice users. If you would look at what Friendster was back then and now, you will see a very big difference. Friendster profiles now are having their own unique look on pages and whatnots on their profiles.

Too much fluff. Too much junk. Too much crap, that is. You can easily see the difference between a novice’s profile page and a professional’s profile page (if ever there are any). I am not saying that my own page on Friendster looks like a work of a pro, matter of fact, what I am using in my page is a built-in template on Friendster. I don’t mind if it is simple, what matters most is the readability of my profile page. I don’t care about the new things that you can put on Friendster, may it be an embedded video, may it be a customizable css, may it be an embedded music, those stuff are USELESS!

Because of its customizability, you will be able to see many CSS WANNABEES, parading their cluttered up profile pages, overslapped with tons of useless junk. These wannabees think that their profile pages are good looking because of the beautiful background, well Im gonna tell them right now, ITS NOT! I see some people that have pictures on their background, but you can barely read their profile, sometimes you can see dark background profiles with dark fonts or light background profiles with light colored fonts, see the irony? You can’t even see what you came there for in the first place (the profile information).

That is where you can see the difference between people who knows how to use CSS and people who think they know how to use CSS. You know, the copy-paste wannabees. For God’s sake, they really should stop cluttering up the CSS codes if they don’t know how to properly manipulate and use it.

And there are the blinkers, animated pictures, marquees, etc., they are cute, well at first, but those are also useless. Very amateurish, I used to use these animated gif, marquees, and stuff back then when I was starting to learn html way back before Friendster was born and geocities is a hit. I was amateur back then, and since then I realized those stuff are what separates an amateur from a pro. Amateurs tend to use tons of those stuff while pro’s use those stuff minimally down to never.

Sooner or later when you will have the thirst to know more about html, programming, coding (php, ajax, scripting) and stuff, you will learn the things that can drive away an individual from a webpage and swear never to come back again. One of those is music. You heard me right. Music. I agree, embedding music specially hot, new, off the hook music is great to listen to, but not on an unsuspecting page. Im always victimized by these Friendster profiles with music embedded pages. Its great to know that you can embed music, but to tell you the truth, it really, really, damn horrible. Whenever I hear music on an unsuspecting page, I always have the automatic reaction to point my cursor to the close window button at the corner of my page. I am not saying that you cannot embed music on your pages, but do us a favor, make sure that the user visiting your page has the option whether or not to have the music playing on the background or not. You may think it’s cool to have background music to your page, but to tell you the truth, it’s very horrible. Music maybe fine if your page is a page of a songwriter, or you are a singer, or your pages is about songs, but always have an option for the music to be turned on or off. Not all visitors like pages that have music on it.

Another mention here is the annoying “Welcome to my page” pop up. What a useless crap, unless the pop-up contains an announcement, or a notification or something more important. Letting users view your profile page on Friendster is enough for them to know that you are welcoming them on your page. There is no need for reiteration.

On the final note, I am not telling you, Friendster user, to remove all the things you have put on your personal page, it’s yours, you can do anything with it, clutter it up, put so much stuff into it, I don’t care, but please give your profile viewer’s a favor, make your pages easy to be read. Save your users from straining their eyes viewing ugly coded profile pages.

But if you don’t want to, still thanks to Friendster, they gave us the option “safe mode” so that we have the option not to see any cluttered up, ugly, horrible, Friendster profile pages. You see, even Friendster gave its users an “option”. A million thanks to that.

Guilty? Then I hope this article serves as an eye opener.

I know. Those people who would react aggressively against this article are the ones guilty. Don’t worry, we understand you, and your reaction is just normal and expected. As a nurse, I know, you are using the denial as your defense mechanism. So nothing earth shattering.

Just my two cents.

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