Welcome to the Weekly What The Heck. Today we have some WTHs about Digg, and one about MySpace (bleh!).

Microsoft Tries to Buy Yahoo for $50 Billion: Luckily, Yahoo declined. The last thing we need is a huge “MicroYahoo” taking over the web.

Microsoft Patents the Unix/Linux command “Sudo”: Okay, that idea has been used in *nix OSes for a looong time, and the idea has been implemented in the Mac OS since 2001. How can Microshaft get away with that?

New Laws Make It a Big Pain to Sell CDs: They take your fingerprints and record a ton of info about you…and you can’t sell a CD if you’ve had it for less than 30 days. WTH? What’s next? A photo-ID requirement to buy fries at McDonalds?

MySpace Buys Photobucket: Hang on a minute. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Okay, now what was I saying? Oh yes, is Photobucket insane? Sure they get several million, but they sold out to MySpace. WTH? MySpace is the number one contender for the Redwall_hp Most Irritating Website Award. Most of Photobucket’s users don’t do MySpace anyway? Do you honestly think they’ll continue using Photobucket if they have to become a MySpace user?

I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to say this, but… MySpace is stupid! Why the heck are all these people using it? It doesn’t make sense. Why are movie companies setting up MySpace pages for movies instead of making a decent website? Here are, in no particular order, 15 reasons MySpace is garbage.

1. It’s MySpace.
2. You have to wait 5 minutes for every freakin’ page to load.
3. There’s no content. All there is on MySpace is some stuff about a bunch of airheads you don’t know.
4. MySpace users obviously aren’t designers. Nearly every page looks like…I don’t know what. Is the web slipping back into the early ’90s?
5. Backgorund music. I though we were rid of that annoying web “feature”.
6. Background images that render text unreadable.
7. MySpace news. Reall, what was Fox thinking?
8. It’s owned by Faux, er Fox, News.
9. Tons of ads. They must be the most interesting part of the site.
10. MySpace, and it’s parent company (Fox News), owns everything you write on it. That’s right. That’s got to suck for those bands that post music on MySpace…
11. Stupid “friends lists”. What the heck? This concept makes no sense, and it’s usage makes even less sense.
12. Nearly every link (even internal ones) opens in a new window.
13. MySpace has been the distributor of a surprising amountof spyware.
14. You can now buy MySpace Sucks T-Shirts.
15. Just Google “MySpace Sucks”. You get 2,720,000 results.

I don’t have a MySpace account and I never will. If you have an IQ level over 6, then you shouldn’t either.

There are plenty of AJAX portals out there. There’s iGoogle, Netvibes, PagePlakes, and others as well. Do you know what’s wrong with them? None of them are right. You see, I only occasionally use any of these AJAX portals because they just don’t work the way I want them to.

Netvibes comes closest (with iGoogle second). I like being able to add a feed-reading box nearly instantly, for one thing. What’s wrong with Netvibes? I don’t like the weird splash-screen while it loads, and I’d prefer to be prompted for my login immediately, instead of getting a “demo portal”. Too bad, Netvibes is really good.

iGoogle is okay, but it’s a pain to login to that too. You have to either go to www.google.com/ig/ or go to google.com and click the iGoogle link. I don’t like having to leave my Google Account logged in on public computers, which I use now and then, either. I never thought I’d say this, but the design is too spartan. This is coming from someone who’s a big fan of whitespace, apple-style layouts, etc.

Pageflakes is worse than netvibes. They give you a stupid pop-up box-thingy that tells you to register. Then there’s a puny little login link down at the bottom. If they put a login form in that box, I’d use PageFlakes.

You see? Every one of these AJAX portals has the same sort of flaw. I don’t like it. Why can’t they just fix it and be done with it? Netvibes would be the ultimate AJAX portal if they’d just throw up a login form that opens in a popup-box like PageFlakes’s register thing.

Okay, is Digg digging it’s grave? I’ve been a Digg user for a while, but lately I’ve been moving towardd Reddit a bit. Digg seems to have too many shortcomings to be worth it. Let’s compare them.

DIGG

• Great design (+1).
• Easy to use (+1).
• Innovator in the field (+1).
• Bigger userbase (+1).
• The system just feels right (+1).
• Annoying immature users (-1).
• Flawed voting system gives senior users more control (-1).
• Stupid mandatory categories make it hard to post things in the right place (-1).
• Tons of stupid stuff gets dugg to the top, while the more important stuff has a tendancy to be burried into oblivion (-1).

REDDIT

• Design isn’t…right (-1).
• A little less user-friendly than digg (-1).
• The average user seems more intelligent (+1).
• Less stupid stuff is posted (+1).
• Great code of conduct makes the site less out-of-hand (+1).
• Reddit tries to find the sort of thing you like, potentially improving the whole “Digg-concept” by a lot (+1).
• The developers seem to care more about the site doing what it should…instead of having it be “fun” (+1).

TOTALS: Digg=1, Reddit=3

Okay, this scheme of rating may not be totally accurate, but it does point out some important flaws. Seriously, I think Reddit is showing promise, and I’m starting to move over from Digg. I’ll probably continue to use both, but I’ll focuse on Reddit more. I don’t want stupid pictures of motorized rollerblades (yes, that did show up once), I want the best of the blogosphere. By “the best of the blogosphere”, I mean blogs like Engadget, not “what I had for lunch today blogs”.

Reddit is not without it’s flaws. I’m not a big fan of some aspects of it’s design (I prefer a dedicated “Digg Page” to a top-frame thing like Reddit has, and the buttons they have for blogs need more work. I like Digg better in those aspects, but Reddit is improving. Anything to escape a lot of the garbage cluttering-up Digg.

You’ve used Imageshack before, haven’t you? You probably have images you want to post on a blog or forum all the time. It’s a great concept though, predictably, it hasn’t worked out well.

Have you noticed how sluggish Imageshack has become? On my 800k-1mb connection, Imageshack usually takes three minutes to load. Then it takes an exhorbitant amount of time to upload my image. To top that all off, the uploaded images load slowly when you hotlink them. Seems as if they need to drop some cash on new servers.

There are alternatives, like TinyPic, though they have some annoyances as well. Tinypic is lightning-fast, but they have two useful features missing. One, TinyPic needs a transloader function like Imageshack’s. Two, TinyPic needs to offer a field with just the image URL. They give you the preformatted garbage that you have to re-edit. If i’m using the image on my blog, I just need the URL, not BBCode or their prefab HTML.

There aren’t many good image hosts out there. We need more. We need good ones. Imageshack/Tinypic are neccessary evils (got to combat that Digg effect ) for now.

I don’t care about IE (I’ve used Firefox since it came out). Anyway, Microsoft has been hinting about Internet Explorer 8. Nothing much, it’s just playing catch-up to the reliablility of Firefox, and the features of Firefox 3. What they conventiantly didn’t mention is the fact that IE8 will only be for Vista. With IE7, there are already some things that only work on the Vista platform. With Vista failing so far, Microsoft will most definitely prop it up by making you “upgrade” to use IE8. Who’s going to fall for that? Upgrade from IE7 to Firefox 3 and buy a Mac when you need a new computer. Problem solved.

Welcome to the Weekly What The Heck. So, WTH is going on?

Verizon Trying to Patent VoIP, Sues Vonage: How the heck can Verizon sue an established company over something like that? VoIP shouldn’t belong to anyone anyway. In case you were wondering, services like Skype are considered to be VoIP. As FreeToCompete.com says: “Send Verizon an Orange”.

Microsoft Employee Blogs About Switching to Linux: Be careful, you’ll invoke the wrath of Bill Gates. On second thought, send him an email. Tell him about your blog.

 How to Stop Digg-cheating, Forever: I don’t think so. That would make Digg even less useful.