New MySpace

[onjegolders]

If anyone's interested and I was mainly for the hype surrounding the new design, the new mySpace is now out of beta.

http://www.myspace.com

Definitely worth a look for the design alone!

[Joss]

AH, that is interesting - my few thousand friends seem to have vanished.

At least my music is still there.

All the other info has gone though.

Design is interesting, but I have yet to work out what can be done with it

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

I am just glad to see a potential challenger to Facebook's domination.

Thanks,

Matthew

[onjegolders]

AH, that is interesting - my few thousand friends seem to have vanished.

At least my music is still there.

All the other info has gone though.

Design is interesting, but I have yet to work out what can be done with it

You can still access the "old" one too, there should be an option when you first land on the site.

[Joss]

I am just glad to see a potential challenger to Facebook's domination.

I suspect that is possibly rather optimistic,

In the end, it does makes sense to have just one "facebook" type system in the same way as it makes sense to have just one internet, especially to help support the idealistic view that the internet is the very definition of the Global Village

It doesn't work so well if the "village" is made up of hundreds of competing communities...

On the downside, Facebook is a commercial business and should a commercial business be allowed to be the social centre of the global society?

Then again, I doubt that 99% of people really care! 

[MatthewSchenker]

Hey Everyone,

Joss: I don't expect anyone to pose a true challenge to Facebook right now... Except Facebook itself, which I think in some ways is beginning to happen.

I think Facebook has its importance, for sure. But Facebook has always felt rather antithetical to what I see as beautiful Web development, for a variety of reasons... The way it cheapens true discussion, how a single social-networking paradigm is blocking exploration of the very idea of Web-based connections, and how the ugly appearance of a set of icons litters pages everywhere we look. Finally, we generally have to hold our tongues about all of this lest we seem to go against mighty Facebook.

Maybe if I started developing Facebook apps I might feel differently!

Thanks,

Matthew

[Joss]

Maybe if I started developing Facebook apps I might feel differently!

One of the things I find very clever about Facebook is that they concentrated on pure functionality rather then look - the idea being that it was what people were posting that was important, not the frame.

I see this with my kids who have always found Facebook very intuitive to use where as things like Myspace was cumbersome and awkward.

When it comes to how it affects social interaction, in fact, I think it has had much less impact than sociologist like to think. In the end, it is only a platform - how you choose to communicate is purely personal. When I see the conversations on facebook between my lot, they are no different from the purile communication that was common to Usenet years and years ago - or, for that matter, the playground of my youth.

The real impact is that this form of communication is now in the global public domain, whereas previously it was in little, isolated pockets.

Twitter, with its limit on the number of characters, has probably had far more impact, and although I do use it, I am not fond of it.

Actually, I dont use any of these systems particularly. I used MySpace purely as a promotional tool, but that has wained, and some of my writing automatically posts to FB and Twitter. But they are not a day-to-day place for me in the way they are for the rest of my family.

[onjegolders]

One of the things I find very clever about Facebook is that they concentrated on pure functionality rather then look - the idea being that it was what people were posting that was important, not the frame.

I see this with my kids who have always found Facebook very intuitive to use where as things like Myspace was cumbersome and awkward.

When it comes to how it affects social interaction, in fact, I think it has had much less impact than sociologist like to think. In the end, it is only a platform - how you choose to communicate is purely personal. When I see the conversations on facebook between my lot, they are no different from the purile communication that was common to Usenet years and years ago - or, for that matter, the playground of my youth.

The real impact is that this form of communication is now in the global public domain, whereas previously it was in little, isolated pockets.

Twitter, with its limit on the number of characters, has probably had far more impact, and although I do use it, I am not fond of it.

Actually, I dont use any of these systems particularly. I used MySpace purely as a promotional tool, but that has wained, and some of my writing automatically posts to FB and Twitter. But they are not a day-to-day place for me in the way they are for the rest of my family.

Agree with you on all that Joss.

I must be the web guy who is the least involved with Twitter and to a lesser extent FB. I just find it such a huge time waster. Although obviously it's important for many clients.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

I agree, Facebook is a huge time waster.  To me, it's even worse than that. There is no evidence that "liking" anything on Facebook leads to anything beyond Facebook itself, and yet organizations (and individuals) are putting increasing resources into their "Facebook presence" that could be better spent in other creative Web development.

Regarding functionality: I find Facebook to be one of the most un-intuitive sites.  I was chatting with some developers a year ago about this, and one of them said something I always think about: Facebook obscures its functions intentionally, which forces you to wander through the site (i.e., spend more time there).  Maybe this is an obvious observation, I don't know.

Thanks,

Matthew

[ryan]

I don't personally use Facebook more than once a month or so (never could get into it). But I've always been proud of the fact that Facebook was, and is built on PHP. Back before Facebook was the world's busiest site, the "people complaining about PHP" strategy was to say that PHP couldn't scale or be used for big/major things... kind of like all PHP developers were just children playing. Even then it was kind of a silly thing to say (Digg and Yahoo were using it at pretty large scale), but you just don't see that argument made anymore. PHP has been tested at a larger scale than any other web programming language ever has. 

[Pete]

I point people to Facebook and Google as massive PHP adopters. Not sure which part of Google, I just read somewhere that they use it a LOT.

It is an outdated viewpoint and has been for many years - all the cool kids now use PHP and benefit from it's rapid development cycle compared to other languages. Sure, there are some neat things in other languages that aren't yet in PHP that others love to scoff at, but at the end of the day it's perfectly good for 99.9% of the people using it. and, yes, massively scaleable as long as you've got the programming skills and the server power.

[Joss]

@Ryan - trust me, you still see that argument.

Wurm Online is built with Java, and the developers continually point out that the big weak link is the PHP website.

Which is completely unfair - the twice they got hacked was because they had either not updated in ages or because they let someone install something stupid that opened a great big hole. 

[teppo]

I personally prefer the aesthetics and UX of Facebook, though I do realize that it's clearly not for everyone. Like Joss already pointed out, they've never been into eye-candy; each and every one of those little details, buttons and links serves a clear and mostly unique function.

Another thing I admire is the fact that they've always been happy to make changes they believe will enhance that experience, no matter how risky or how many people they might annoy in the process. Not everything they do succeeds, but at least they have a vision and are not afraid to take the platform further -- something MySpace originally failed to do and one of the reasons it lost it's place as the top dog of social websites. New MySpace does seem like something that could offer real competition though, I guess we'll see how well that works out

Regarding Facebook and PHP, they've definitely done a lot to development and reputation of the project by proving that it can be used for pretty big things and also by participating directly via enhancements and bug fixes. Then again, the vast amount of resources they possess have made FB pretty unique and not directly comparable with the rest of us; for an example they're the only company I've heard of that has built and is using their own PHP execution engine 

[onjegolders]

Facebook and Amazon have a lot in common when it comes to aesthetics. 

Both are pretty ugly, but they both must be doing something right!