The return of the ugly web sites

Some might argue that the ugly web sites never even left. Everyone remembers these awful personal home pages people had in the 90ies. With blinking text, marquees, bright colors, etc. The ones that looked like a big mess. Well, now with MySpace and whatever, things have gone to a completely new level. I can't understand how the majority of people who author content online and run their home pages appear to be blind (no offense to blind people, I'm actually fairly certain that you could do an even better job of designing a web page than the MySpace crowd).

And to make things even more fun, the entire Web 2.0 movement has a strong foundation and belief in mashups. Mashups are essentially created when you take data you have in different sites or services (e.g. Last.fm, Flickr, etc.), pull them all together, repackage it and provide onwards. So now every self-respecting site is providing these simple tools for pulling together the data to show on your own personal home page. I can have my Last.fm recently played tracks on my home page. I can have my Jaiku status on my page. Flickr images? No problem. Except that there, in fact, is a really big problem...

All of the plugins/badges/images/etc. are different. They don't offer any sort of nice and consistent feel. You can see precisely which part of the web page is polled from a different service. And it looks ugly. That's one reason why I haven't bothered slapping my sidebar full of stuff, even though I'd like to. Then there's another thing; with people cramming every imaginable thing from Flickr photos to kitchen sinks on their personal home pages, the pages take an incredible time to load and the resource usage is at worst a pure nightmare (first you load the page, then you execute the JavaScript on it, then the JavaScript pulls in even more JavaScript from wherever, or pulls data from somewhere, parses it and then presents it). It's unbelievable. And then the resulting page looks like pure crap.