Social Web 3.0

Time to get down to business. This blog is all about social networking, so it’s time for me to talk about a few different social networking websites. The obvious two to look at are Facebook and MySpace; even my mom has one (literally.) The third website I’ve been using is a site called Twitter, which I wrote about earlier. Let me preface this all by saying that these are just my opinions about each site, and that I’ve been designing and developing websites for over a decade now, and along with being a perfectionist, I have a very biased view.

What Are They?

Lets start by talking about Facebook, because it’s popular and I happen to like it. Facebook started out for college students only — or really — for students with a college email account. About this time I was hating, but dealing with, MySpace (we’ll get into that later). I heard tons about Facebook and how I need to look at somebody’s photos on it; unfortunately I was still at junior college and had no college email to get into it. More recently, Facebook has opened up to anybody who wants an account. That’s when I joined in — leading to me deleting my MySpace account.

The thing I like about Facebook is that it’s a really good way to connect to people in a decently well made package. I volunteer as a leader at my church, and as an organization tool, Facebook is fantastic for us. Our college group has it’s own group so that one leader can send out a message to the entire group, and they can easily opt in or out of that group. On top of that, there’s a closed group for the leaders in which we can communicate privately. Even a lot of the bible studies have their own group for communication. A big point on which I differ from the general public is that I’m happy my family is using Facebook. My family likes to know what I do, and they like lots of details about it. If they log into Facebook, they can get the details and all I have to do is answer a few more questions. I’m of the opinion that if there isn’t something you want your parents to see, don’t put it up on Facebook. I can see how friends could post pictures of you from a crazy party, but to that I just have to ask, “Why are you taking photos at a party? They don’t turn out good, get people in trouble, and distract you from the people.”1

The one thing that really bugs me about Facebook is the application SDK added somewhat recently. The idea is that it allows anyone to create an application to do something on your Facebook account. Unfortunately, put into practice, this means that you get a lot of annoying invitations for applications that you really don’t care about and are more often than not poorly made.

Now that I’ve leveled my sights at Facebook, it’s MySpace’s turn — and it won’t be pretty. MySpace was the first of these three social networking sites that I used2, and the one I’m least fond of. I’ll qualify this by saying that the biggest thing that bugs me about MySpace is how poorly it’s made. I can’t get on it without cringing at the poor interface design, or the bad markup, or how hard it really makes it for users to actually use. All that said, it is still ridiculously popular. Whether or not it’s a good tool, people started using it and it essentially made social networking somewhat of a household term. As I said earlier, I had deleted my MySpace account back when Facebook started allowing anyone, and so I haven’t been using it for about the past two years. I have followed it a bit through my girlfriend’s account, and my own account re-opened in order to evaluate it for this blog post, and I can say that nothing has really changed enough to win me back. They’ve re-skinned their account landing page to look cleaner, but as far as I can tell, they’ve just made it prettier, not easier to use3.

Now that I’ve reamed MySpace, I should talk about one of my new favorite pets, Twitter. Perhaps to understand it, seeing would help; my account can be found here. The concept behind Twitter is simple; you have 140 characters to say what you want, which you can simply post, reply to another users post, or use the “@” character and another users name to direct your post at them.

I was actually talking about writing this post to a friend today and mentioned that I was including Twitter alongside Facebook and MySpace. His first thought was that it was strange to classify it as a social network, but as we talked, we agreed that it is essentially the most basic a social network can be. You create simple messages for other users to see. From there, anyone you’ve directed a post at as well as people following your twitter account are notified of this new post and can go read it. The real problem for me is that I only know one person locally well enough to follow him. The rest of the accounts I follow are things like CNN’s breaking news Twitter feed and some well known bloggers that I respect. I think it would be a much more valuable tool if I had more local friends on it, but I still enjoy using it quite a bit.

How Do I End This Blog?

The only obvious way I can think to end this is by saying I really want to join MyFace but am reasonably scared to.