Changing around the style of your profile is a big part of MySpace’s culture. Heavy users change their profiles daily, leading to over half a million threads in MySpace’s forums from users asking how they can customize their profiles. Yet after four years of operation, profile design still consists of CSS hacked together through third party sites or an allegedly ripped-off (Real Editor) editor that only works in IE.
Online website designer Weebly has done better and provided a lot of the functionality MySpace should already have. They’ve spent the last several months not only creating their own MySpace profile editor but also an integrated widget platform to boot. It’s all hosted under a new site called SnapLayout.
The SnapLayout editor is pretty straight forward. You log in with your MySpace credentials, and can use a WYSIWYG editor to make drag-and-drop changes to all the major features of your profile. You can select a pre-made template or start customizing changes on your own. The editor lets you move around boxes, use Flickr photos for a backdrop, adjust text size and style, or even change the entire color pallet of your profile (i.e. summer and winter themes). It can also add a slide show of all your uploaded photos to the header of your profile. I’ll defer the details to Justine Ezarik and surprise guest MC Hammer in their demo video below.
The more significant piece, however, is the widget platform that lets users select and add widgets to their profile. All you need to do is click on one of the widgets and drag it to where you want it on your profile. Their first example is a free gift widget that lets you and your friends give virtual gifts to each other. When you give a gift to a friend, you just need to log in to MySpace to verify your true identity. There’s a viral aspect to the widget because users that want to show their gifts will have to have a SnapLayout profile as well. They will be adding a select number of widgets in the coming weeks and eventually opening the system.
The danger is, of course, is that MySpace releases their own system in the coming months. But their snail’s pace of innovation doesn’t make that likely. Lets just hope that MySpace doesn’t find the service in violation of their terms of service and shuts down yet another third party application that adds functionality to the site.
Don’t get me wrong I love myspace - but your so right on two points.
one:They move slow as dirt when it comes to innovation.
two: they ban many third party functions which I believe will be the reason why myspace will face a big world of hurt in membership soon. And when I say members I mean active members - not the membership that have a page and haven’t used it in 4 years.
The biggest problem I have with MySpace is the super-ugly pages. Having a tool, even a third-party tool, to make it easier to change is a step forward. I can only assume that with the open platform there will be more focus in this area in the coming months.
I like this. It’s something like I’ve always wanted to be involved with building.
AKAIK, they only ban 3rd-party services which violate the TOS. Usually 3rd-party services which include ads.
I can forward this information to my friends, who have been struggling to modify their Myspace layout. I hope SnapLayout is worth their time. In my opinion I would still stick with Facebook and its apps.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
If you are going to use an ajax login, dont post the password in plain text! Otherwise the site looks nice. If they get some traction I’m sure they can sell some of the widget spots to widget providers. The only other issue is, im sure none of this will work as of next week when MySpace releases its developer platform.
If it’s good enough for Hammer, it’s good enough for me.
Stop. Hammer time.
What joe laz said ^
!!! SECURITY WARNING !!!
You’ll spread your myspace login data (email and password) to the snaplayout website so they theoretically have unlimited access to your whole myspace account. That’s really irresponsible because they only say “we wont save your password” but can you trust? With those services users will never get sensitized to security and privacy.
@9
Its the same thing that Facebook/LinkedIN and many other sites do when pulling data out of your gmail account to get your contacts, people don’t seem to have too much of a problem with that. (I don’t know about you but I’m far far far more worried about my email than my myspace account) Anyways, until these sites start offering open APIs (hello google?!) and using OAuth this is how things are going to go.
They should have had this in the beginning. Editing your myspace profile was always tedious.
#9 - You share credentials with lots of sites when you have them import your addressbook as Jamie pointed out. The people over at Weebly actually run a pretty decent business
@Ed and Jamie.
Even if some (popular) services do such evil things I guess it’s no general justification/excuse. I don’t wanna say weebly or facebook uses your data BUT with each additional service of that kind people loose more and more respect to security and privacy.
If a service doesn’t have a public API or a authentication mechanism (or SSO) for external services security-aware developers wouldn’t implement such potentential security risk in respect of their users.
@13
I’d hardly call it evil unless being used maliciously on purpose. Its your option to use it, so if you don’t want to, don’t.
Customization vs Apps. Customization always wins regardless how ugly and messy it gets. If you don’t get that by now, goodluck. And don’t forget that FB app developers will have their apps available for myspace in a few weeks.
This isn’t the first WYSIWYG. A WYSIWYG editor already exists at http://www.profilemine.com
@13 - That’s really a problem that starts with the user themselves. There are companies with good Privacy Policies which they uphold clearly, and those who don’t, and will sell your information to third-parties. The average user won’t read the Privacy and User Agreement statements, so the issue of security has just as much to do with the people behind the website as the people using it.
The Myspace stuff is soooooo ugly, maybe this will help!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
We need a snaplayout design for http://outdoorzy.com
Looks like having a late 80s or early 90 celeb as a spokesperson is key too. Maybe I’ll hit up PeeWee Herman… wait, maybe that isn’t the message we’re shooting for either. Maybe Mr T. I hear he needs work.
BTW, do the kids on Myspace even know who Hammer is?
#19 - They probably only know him from those tiny little gifs of him doing his signature dance in the balloon pants
No link to Justine? http://tastyblogsnack.com
Did MySpace block SnapLayout? Because it won’t log in for me.
Me too, login not working! the site is broke
Sorry guys — MySpace is having issues right now. They seem to have changed the format of profiles around slightly, which is causing everybody to update their profiles, and has bogged down the CAPTCHA service (it’s currently unresponsive). We’ve updated our profile styles to match the new profile format, and we’re working on the log-in issues right now, and should be solved shortly.
Like the video!
Maybe I can get one of MC Hammer waking up iJustine
Damn that Justine is hot
Good profile editing is so the least of MySpace’s worries.
Alright - all should be fixed now. It’s interesting to note that with these changes, MySpace added API key fields.
cool app…. random video… both work for me
How is this even news…? There are tons of good editors out there that are super easy to use. For example: http://www.mywackospace.com/myspace-editor/
I am so sick of those crunchbase links!
I’ve tried it on my page. It really looked awesome, but loading the page took ages! Therefore I’ve changed it back to the design I had. Customization is important, but you would have to be very interested in a person to wait for the page to load.
Why don’t you guys link directly to the site nowhere in this article?
not safety
I would absolutely use any product endorsed by MC Hammer.
Eh.. Not bad but not that flexible either. I like Realeditor better.
I tried this and it completely hosed my myspace site in firefox.
I don’t get why you guys post a link to this site, while there are many sites out there offering the same functionality.
If snaplayout paid you, at least put a “sponsored by” hint next to the post