Rage at PageRage

I went on YouTube yesterday and, annoyingly, was greeted by the same pre-video advertisement over the course of a few videos.

PageRage – who I refuse to link to – is one of those companies that purports to allow the user to customise their Facebook profiles in order to “reflect their personality”.

Or some meaningless crap along those lines.

They also had a TON of sidebar ads.

First of all, the entire point in Facebook is that everyone’s profile looks the same; it’s what’s contained in each profile that makes each different and interesting. Yet again, people apparently want to turn Facebook – whose look is, on the whole, clean and modern, into MySpace’s horrible mid-90s design-student-orgasm nightmare.

One of the key tenets of Facebook’s disallowing of user profile customisation is that many users are not skilled web designers. We all know MySpace famously or infamously for letting the user go to town with HTML and CSS – result being nigh-on unusable, seizure-inducing monstrosities that crash even a Cray supercomputer with hundreds of animated graphics, flashing icons and terrible looping background music.

Companies like PageRage - of which they are by no means the first - seem to use some mythical market knowledge that everyone wants to be able to “express themselves” through the background of their Facebook profiles.

The silver lining with PageRage? It’s a browser plug-in, and hence only makes changes to the particular user’s Facebook experience. If they want to sully their eyes and fill their PCs with crapware that’s fine with me.

Just, please, stop interrupting my YouTube experience. That goes for all pre-video adverts.

Though if anyone actually needed to “express their personality” with some stupid picture of hearts, stars, wired geometric shapes (this thing conforms to the Design Student’s Orgasm trope so, so much)  Rio Ferdinand or whoever the hell is the flavour of the month as opposed to letting their personality be portrayed through their information is in actual fact just incredibly shallow and superficial, and not someone I’ll be “poking” any time soon.