Andrew Chen has a great post on how people use Facebook and why MySpace pages are so ugly
I particularly liked the straightforward comparison between the opposing viewpoints on design, i.e.:
Facebook / Google / “modern” web companies:
- Simple, Functional, Easy
Myspace / GeoCities / “poorly designed” web presences:
- Lots of options – perceived as complicated
- Entertaining – perceived as lacking a point
- Layers of complexity – perceived as difficult
So. Scrapbooking. A $2.5 Billion industry, huh? Serious food for thought for game designers trying to think up ways to take advantage of Web 2.0, but struggling to break out of the boring “chat”, “friends lists”, and “character pages” ideas…
One reply on “The rest of the world is not like us…”
That’s a great point about the scrapbooking. I myself had no idea what it was, or how big it was, until I, you know, *got a girlfriend*.
Some people really like the “cluttered” aesthetic. You see culture swing back and forth between clean and complicated design all the time. Compare neoclassical and rococco, art deco and art nouveau, modern and psychedelic… MySpace and Facebook are just that same design dichotomy.