Social Networking Wars

The social networking wars are certainly hotting up.

To my mind Facebook is the clear leader at the moment whereaqs MySpace is really begining to show its age. Why?

MySpace is an open architecture whereas Facebook to some extent is closed off. This initially helped mySpace as it gave users a huge amount of personalisation but I think this is now becoming the rope by which it will be hung. Too much spam, huge amounts of bloated unusable pages and flash aps embedded everywhere result is one of the worst user experiences for such a commercial site in many years.

Facebook on the other hand has kept itself clean. The IA and UE are class leading 95% of the time. It's build in a huge number of features that are making it one of the stickiest sites around and the features keep coming. Opening the API up to developers is a genious move. And then there's the user base. MySpace built it's user base around music initially to gain a huge leap in subscribers and it's more tailored to a younger audience, whereas Facebook is more focused on education in terms of it's initial user lead. School turns to work and academia and the users grow. The thing that's catching media attention in the UK is that Facebook is MySpace for grown ups. To some extent this will be the secret to it's success. MySpace broke early adopters into social networking, but Facebook will take the momentum and capirtalise on it taking social networking mass market.

So where next? How will MySpace respond? Will it respond?

2 things

2 things caught my eye today. First is the campaigh site produces by Poke for Orange. Just to prove that it's ideas that really count spotthebull.orange.co.uk/.

And then a neat little redesign of the Skype homepage. The really great use of screen width worked for me.

Design for MySpace

MySpace of all the social network sites gices user the unique opportunity to customise the visual display a huge amount. Clever use of css can produce some very unique results. So it seemed my duty hack the hell out of the site to see what I could do. No only for my personal use but increasingly as brands and in particulalr bands use myspace for commercial promotion a need to create bespoke identities built on the myspace platform in becoming more and more popular. See the initial results below. I'll be hacking this some more when I get the time.

http://www.myspace.com/jamvikt

Web designers as product designers

So here's an idea that's been rattling round for a while now. Over the years as an interactive designer if worked witha really diverse range of other designers but one comnmon trait that seems to flow through all these people is the some people get it and some don't. Like some ad peopole dont 'get' digital, some designers don't get digitial. But then some of the designers that to 'get' digital are lousy with typography.

So here's my thinking. There are 2 types of 'web' designer, those that consider themselves 'interactive' designers and those that consider themselves 'graphic' designers. And this informs an approach. Interactive designers will apprach a breif as if it was a product and graphic designers approach brief as if it were a poster.

How it works, what's it's purpose and who uses it come to be the primary questions a product designer asks whereas a graphic designer will being with aesthetics, typography and colour.

Don't get me wrong, neither approach is wrong when applied to web design, but each approach does produce startlingly different results. Creative Director's need to b euilt their teams carefully and clients need to select their agencies carefully.

Next generation magazines

TBC

Back off

Are back buttons on a website bad? It's a question and request that almost always comes up. My feeling is that back buttons signal a flawed navigation model, but is that correct to assume? So let's argue that back buttons are for error correction - the user didn't want to follow the route they'd chosen. Should the browsers back button not be for this purpose, but then ok, checkouts and other transactional processes can fail when users resort to the browsers back buttons, but then the back buttons is obsolete here, the buttons should be user centered and be inteligent to direct error correction - 'Edit your details' rather then the meaningless 'Back'.

And on less transactional sites? 'Back' has to show a flawed navigation model, i can't think of a reason why it woudln't. The users journeys should be informed and logical and the site should guide.

Please any ideas?

BMW Microsite

1off.com a new site for BMW looks pretty neat. A health dose a clean design with a light sprinkling of 2.0 and some celebrities for added flavour come together to create quite a good little concept. Google mash up for a community/dealer locator.

It's interesting to see how different organisations are responding to the 2.0 wave thats sweeping the uk marketing teams at the moment and this is a good example of a more corporate approach. Proof will be in the uptake so keep your eyes on it.

Nice work from the people over at airlock.com