Some news is good news

Online news services are in an interesting position at the moment. With the ubiquity of RSS, the reliance on blogs and news aggregators users are finding new and dynamic ways of accessing news services without actually visiting the news source providing the information. Still though, news sites for a large part of users daily browsing habits and are competing in an increasingly saturated and competitive market.

Wired which has always been an early adopter and in some ways shaper – it was after all one of the first commercial sites to adopt true CSS/XHTML build principles before they were widespread - has recently changed the way it reports to be far more blog oriented approach. It far less rigid than it’s ever been and seems to continually adapt what it displays. The traditional nav as we know it has gone. Once a reader enters a story though is where the interesting part takes place. The story is essentially part of a large blog albeit highly topical.

TimesOnline which has been the most high profile UK launch recently have got a superb product. It’s been designed for today’s market with a good base for moving and looking forward. Editorially it’s engaging and it’s cross linking implementation works excellently. Form one article there’s always another destination albeit sometimes back to an index but still the site promotes browsing. It’s graphically very clean although lacks visual impact though photography which lacks across the whole market.

The Guardian has also made quite large adjustments to their site, albeit only on the homepage. The adjustments seem to be a premature reaction to the success of TimesOnline and others at deploying a modernised service. The Guardian cites an 18 month timescale to roll out new services and the adjustment to the homepage is the beginning of this process. It seems in reality as if the homepage has been rushed out to make the site competitive with the rest of the site now in catch-up mode.

The BBC historically ahead of the curve on a lot of things is lagging behind somewhat at the moment. It’s offering is beginning to look extremely tired and the level of editorial intelligence behind the writing and IA is far of what’s been offered elsewhere. Rumours abound that the Beeb is rolling out new interactive services but when and how are the big questions. In the mean time the commercially funded platforms are setting the pace.

Interesting comment on sociasl network traffic

Facebook gains ground as MySpace suffers drop in visitors
brandrepublic.com

The most interesting insight is retalting to engagement and usage. Quoting brand republic.


Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings, said: "MySpace is, by far, still the most popular social network. However, if last month's growth rates were to remain consistent, both Bebo and Facebook would catch MySpace in September this year.

"Meanwhile, MySpace does trail the other two when it comes to user engagement. Bebo leads the way, with its average visitor spending just over an hour and a half on the site -- almost 10 more minutes than the average 'Facebooker' and almost a whole hour more than the average 'MySpacer'."

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