The popularity of inferiority

Luke Leslie Luke 26th Feb 2007

I like my tech, I like my friends, but most of all, I like blending the two. No I do not intend to build my own army of killer cyborgs, I refer of instead to Social networking websites.

Myspace, Bebo, and now Facebook, are 3 Vast online communities I'm sure you've heard of, they all share a lot in common. I'm leaving out many others such as Tickle, Friendster and many more, chiefly because I have no experience with them. Here I will be specifically and briefly exploring the 3 networks I mentioned earlier.

I personally never took too kindly to Myspace. I did use it for a short period, and while it may be popular, at its peak reaching over 50 million visitors last June. I cannot on any level see how it is the best social networking site out there. Lets look at its arguably its biggest failing, the interface.

Even turbo charged broadband starts puking up chunks as it struggles to load your animated gifs, compulsory bad music, transparent text on-top of large background photos, countless recent snapz of your cat and most likely 50 Spam comments from people shamelessly plugging their own pages.

This is not a good sign, in-fact its the first sign of a website beginning to undermine itself. Myspace is currently inadvertently frustrating its users to the point they abandon the site, I've seen it happen, it's not pretty. In a nutshell Myspace is sacrificing ease of use for the option of user customization.

What then? Inevitably, sites like Facebook start up, last June Facebook reached 10 million hits, this site's ethos seems to be a no-nonsense back to basics approach, strip out all the crap, and what does that leave you with? A very simple, easy to use interface, thats zippy simple and fast.

So what's wrong with that?

I'd argue it's too simple, too stripped back. It lacks the simple visual pleasantries of it's competitors, It looks like Microsoft Office circa 1998. Rather interestingly Facebook greatly appeals to college students, many of them seem to believe it's more adult, or more grown up. I usually point out, it's just less colorful, Bebo was the same before they added skins, it looks more like a spreadsheet then a site for talking to ones friends. Its most readily available feature seems to consist of the exciting ability to send gifts to your friends. My hopes were instantly dashed when I received my first clip art of a sock, followed by a spoon.

It's as if the makers of all the worst Microsoft applications from the mid 90's met with the cryptic film makers the Wachowski brothers, creators of the Matrix films. These two factions banded together, and forged a undecipherable code of abstract day to day objects that fused cruddy clip art with gibberish and philosophy. "I got a sock.... But what does it meeean???" In essence my point is: this feature is appalling.

I also grind my teeth to powder every-time Facebook needlessly asks me to put in a security code. All I want to do is ask someone to be my friend. I know people, my Bebo page states I'm connected to 145 individuals, if I wanted to connect to them on Facebook that means typing in 145 separate security codes. Is it just me, or does that kind of sap at my life to the point of insanity? This site is so over simplified and so over protected to the point that we endure a diminished user experience, therefore making it as frustrating a site to use as Myspace.

In the middle of the playing field we have Bebo. The site with a nice playfull name, it almost sounds like a child's daytime TV fantasy "Everyone loves Bebo". Bebo is clearly a company riding the success of sites like Myspace but with a notable difference. Bebo has streamlined their interface. Now that said, much of what Myspace has, Bebo doesn't. It certainly doesn't have the same visitor numbers, nor the same reams of features. But the crucial elements were all there at the beginning. Obvious things like photo galleries, comment boards and email were all in place. Later skins were introduced, and now video players, band pages, animated widgets, plus rakes of other countless distractions.

The key is to offer enough to hook your users, whilst not cluttering your website with junk such as Myspace's needless un-optoimized customized profile pages, sporting my favorite combo of translucent text on translucent images on mindbending repedative patterns. It's things like this that make a user experience, near unusable. I currently believe Bebo has the perfect blend of ease of use, customization and quality features.

Like so many things in life, companies that get there first; hold their own. That said, Google is now the house hold name Yahoo once was, things change quickly in the world of zeros and ones. Companies sometimes learn from mistakes. Apples current growth for example is currently expanding their market share faster then it has for nearly 20 years. And like so many things, what's popular isn't necessary what's good, it's just what caught on, leading me to conclude that this world thrives on the popularity of inferiority.

That last sentence caused some confusion, what is meant, is that many large large and extremely popular companies and services thrive throuhout the world, despite the fact that they are inferior to to arguably better less popular equivalents.

Something's wrong when a Myspace page that should look like this:

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Starts looking like this:

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A Facebook Profile

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online since Jan 06

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