Weekend Website
Usually our Weekend Website article features a site that’s worth checking out whether it be an awesome online service or just a site that offers something useful. To change things up, we thought today we’d “feature” five different web sites that you should avoid! Now, we didn’t come up with this list ourselves — Time Magazine actually came up with this list and published it as their list of the five worst web sites. Any guesses as to which ones made the list?
- eHarmony.com
About eHarmony: If you haven’t heard of eHarmony before, I don’t know where you’ve been living! They have commercials on TV all the time where they show all of the happy couples that have found true love. In a nutshell, they’re an online dating service. While they may have a handful of success stories under their belt, and they claim 90 eHarmony members get married every single day, there’s got to be something about them that would land them on Time magazines list, right?
According to Time, their main issue with eHarmony is their “power to cause utter despair.” They talk about the fact that every member of eHarmony ends up answering 436 compatibility survey questions which means people tend to have more “invested” into the site than other dating sites out there. Combine that with the fact that users pay anywhere from $21-$60 a month to be a member, and they’ll feel like they lost out on quite a bit (money and time) if they don’t find a match.
- Evite.com
About Evite: Evite considers themselves to be “the top online destination for invitations.” They offer a lot of great planning tools like checklists for every event, a budget estimator that will help you calculate how much the event will cost, and more. Additionally, they offer themed planning pages and even have recipes that you can sift through. They offer so much, so what’s the issue?
Time says that their problem is that it’s in need of an overhaul! It’s such a useful site but they’ve apparently put more focus into all of the features that they can offer instead of concentrating how they can present those features in an “easy-on-they-eyes” type of way. They also say that it would be nice if you could upload photos before the party (instead of just after) and the option to include music and video would be nice as well.
- Meez.com
About Meez: Meez, as the name suggests, is about expressing yourself online and creating an avatar. Having an avatar to represent yourself on the Internet has become a fad over the last few years. Meez helps you create the perfect avatar and you can do all of the typical avatar creating things like add a skin tone and body type, add a hairstyle, put on different outfits and add accessories. It’s simple, and Meez helps you get the job done. So what’s the problem?
According to Time, it’s not so much just Meez that is bad, it’s the “digital doodads created with the help of Meez and other sites” like it that are annoying to them.
- MySpace.com
About MySpace: Do I really need to tell you about MySpace? I think not. We all know that it’s one of the most, if not the most popular social network.
Time’s issue with the site is that not only do most of the pages have terrible design, it’s also become invested with spammers and marketers who try to make friends with you. They say that “Of course, there have always been loads of MySpace profiles of fictional characters, created to help market a movie or promote some other brand. But it’s the bait-and-switch tactics from these leeches that have taken things to a whole new- and sad- level.”
- SecondLife.com
About SecondLife: SecondLife is an Internet-based virtual world that launched back in 2003. It’s become a rather popular place for people to go on the Internet, and more than 20 million accounts have been registered.
Time Magazine actually has several issues with the site which include:
- It’s notoriously slow to load
- It’s difficult to navigate
- Creating and personalizing the must-have avatar for the game is tedious
- Movements feel clunky and there can be a terrible lag
- The learning curve is simply too high
There you have it, five sites that you could do without visiting. What sites. if any, would you add to the list?
I agree that MySpace is ugly.
Sweet! I was glad to see my site didn’t make the list!
The reasons for these sites making it to that list is pretty dubious. and i have seen much more worse than myspace.
Yeah, like Facebook for instance. Even though it’s designed much better, their privacy policy is scary. Bad list, bad article, “become invested with spammers”, I think the word they were looking for was ‘infested’.
yeahh, myspace was conquere by spammers. beware..hate them
Facebook, it’s buggy and ugly
i hate myspace because of design and autostarting music in their players
What’s the point of rewriting the original Time article?
Yes, it is. Quite often these “lists” are no more than one intern’s experience of the web, and the magazine editor just runs it to make them feel like a “real” journalist.
Am I bitter much?
What I dislike most about sites like these is the harvesting of your info to promote themselves.
I agree with Yansky. The original Time article was written by someone who is out of touch with the demos these sites are serving. Quit dwelling on a poorly reported meaningless top X list.
secondlife is not a site it’s a virtual world
MySpace always made it to the kind of list. And it crashed my browser a few times too.
Now you can let out a sigh of relief
Some of the reasons weren’t that great but others were really valid – in my opinion.
I think MySpace will always make these types of lists!
I read an article recently that Bebo had overtaken Myspace to become the number one social networking site. Not surprised really. Myspace simply allows too much customisation, which on paper at least is great. Myspace pages can take a looooooong time to load, the automatic music player is annoying particularly if you find a friends page that has awful, chipmonk sounding dance music and you forget your speakers are turned up high. Most Myspace pages are very bad, overloaded with awful graphics, multiple widgets and consequently are difficult to navigate. Personally I just find Bebo to be faster, cleaner and better organised.
i don’t see whats wrong with myspace. it works great for me. yes, it does become a great deal of problems for teens, but i am a teenager, i have seen problems on myspace, my friends have caused trouble, but i ignore it. i think teens with manners and dont like to cause conflict with other kids, like myself dont see the problem with it. :@]