Like I wrote in my previous post I've recently built two MySpace profiles, one for bookalicio.us and one for myself. These profiles were built with the new Profile 2.0 features that MySpace rolled out late 2008. While I was overall quite happy with what's possible in terms of profile customization and design I've identified several weak spots that I think can be improved fairly easily.

Obviously these improvements are of little use to 'joe user' who just wants to 'pimp his profile'. However for professional web developers and especially those who create commercial templates and / or free templates for everyone to use these things would both make life a lot easier and allow for even more awesomeness in MySpace profile creation. So here's my suggestions to the MySpace staff!

1. Separate CSS editor

By far my biggest annoyance when creating a MySpace profile is the way CSS editing is implemented. The implementation almost looks like an afterthought while it really shouldn't be. There's a tiny textarea to enter CSS and any change requires several clicks between saving, checking the result and getting back to this textarea to make more changes. Any 'professional' template developer will use this feature almost exclusively while creating templates. It would have been great if there was a separate CSS edit textarea in which you can simply save your work and stay inside the editor. This way one would be able to check the results of any change made in a separate browser tab with the profile page in it.

2. Allow developers to define their own page grid

While the available page grids are solid there's always the possibility of someone wanting a layout that isn't covered by these grids. my own profile is an example of this. It has the header section, then two modules side by side and then the rest of the modules in full width. Because this type of grid isn't available I had to use CSS tricks to accomplish this layout. It would have been easier if I could have defined my own page grid and add modules in it with a simple tag syntax such as {{moduleName}}. The user defined grid could live within some sort of 'master grid' to prevent tampering with areas that aren't allowed to be messed with (such as the advertisement and the MySpace footer links)

3. Offer asset hosting

In the profiles I created I had to host all images used on my own hosting provider. While this is no problem for me it does impose serious issues when one were to offer free themes for everyone to use or for people that don't have their own hosting for whatever reason. Tumblr offers asset hosting which makes a huge difference. Uploads have a sensible 5MB limit to prevent people from abusing it for the wrong purpose. Plenty enough for any set of template graphics. Right now people without hosting and / or people who want to offer themes have to resort to messy solutions like using Photobucket for their images. Besides being messy this can even result in images not loading because of bandwidth limits. This would be a big issue for popular templates. So come on Tom, allow us to upload a few asset graphics.

4. Allow a set of 'safe' Javascript widgets

It's crystal clear to me why Javascript cannot be used on a MySpace profile. There would simply be way too much abuse. However, some Javascript from trusted sources would be pretty great. A good example is Twitter JS badge or the Tumblr Javascript embed code that allows embedding your Tumblr headlines. And there's a whole lot more of these of course. While it IS possible to embed Flash based external widgets a lot of designers probably want to steer away from these because they often disturb the design by being styled in a totally different way and / or having the wrong size.

5. Allow for custom user defined modules with pure HTML content

It would be great if there was the possibility of having a module with no content at all, which can be filled with whatever markup the user desires. Right now this is still possible by stuffing this markup in the 'About Me' box but... this is messy and still reminds of the old MySpace hacking where people would put content in the 'About Me' box that really shouldn't be there. Like this it gets a whole lot easier to have modules with external links and other things a lot of users probably want to have on their profile.

So here it is, MySpace! Profile 2.0 is pretty cool but it would be even better with the above features implemented!