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There are a couple of sites that I find I would probably use more, but dang they're slow. MySpace and Friendster are a couple of places that I have accounts. Once in a while the fit strikes me to do some people browsing, mostly through link following of friend's friends and such. Those fits get cut short frequently because the bloody pages are so polluted with cruft and busy with ads and markers and such that it gives me a headache. I think the data lookup is slow to begin with but when you top it off with all the flash and wierdness it grinds to a crawl. I applaud their popularity and am impressed with the whole social networking concept but I wish they had more elegant page designs, including layout and content, not just loading efficiency. Another offender in my book was Ain't It Cool News but at least they got rid of that infernal font-size system, where more popular stories were displayed in increasing font sizes. Was an eyesore.

That's something I grew to appreciate the likes of Google which since its inception has generally had minimalist and cleanly layed out pages. The simple and efficient text-only adds are also a breath of fresh air compared to the days when most pages had rows and rows of huge long banner adds and one had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to see the content, or worse, a link to the real content. But it seems to me that they also cared about speed. Their web-mail client is remarkable in not only its concept and user interface but sheer usability due to its speed. Until recently Yahoo mail was more of a burden to use for email, something I would only use in emergencies. I guess I've grown much more appreciative of the user viewing experience: elegant and attractive pages that load quickly.

Another page that I frequent but find frustrating is Lifehacker. It does have a simple and clean presentation. But for the life of me when it loads I get an eye-ache. I'm not sure if it's just my Firefox installations or not but it loads slow and with the few ads popping around the screen as things get filled in, and even afterwards. It's the page instability upon loading that is more the issue. They also keep relatively few posts on the same page and furthermore when you click next and previous links, a third of the posts or more are often the same posts as the original page, causing me to have to click next/prev more often and thus experiencing the loading page instability all the more. I hope someone there fixes that eventually, I do like that site a lot.