MySpace culture is ruining the Internet

First off, yes I am an old fart and an elitist jerk. Sue me. I've just about had it with what the MySpace mentality is doing to the Web. Sure, I'm on board the whole "Web 2.0" bandwagon, but somehow MySpace gets put into the same boat with folks like Meebo, Digg and Google. The whole idea of the social networking website is a valid one. But there are such better implementations of the idea out there.

But, with popularity comes the unwashed masses. Just when I thought the Web as a medium had finally moved beyond ridiculous animated GIFs that burn a hole in the users' collective retinas, the latest fad has become "pimping one's myspace". Where we get to see things like this:



...and this...



Stuff that would probably kill your average epileptic. Gone are the days when people created HTML to be lean, mean and 56k modem-ready. Here are the days of pages with 15 embedded 35 MB videos, embedded flash music players and broken, bloated markup that inevitably crash the visitor's computer like a flight over Lockerbee.

I miss the old days. Jakob Nielsen is dead. Long live Jakob Nielsen.