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Why facebook / myspace irk me

0 comments Published Sunday, August 26, 2007 by Mathieu.

Yesterday while delicately heading down High St in a mind numbing hungover state induced by a Brighton house party (WHITE theme), I finally worked out what irks me about myspace and facebook, and I twittered about it, incidentally through my Nokia, tied to 3's XSeries silver service, and the pain that caused me will however be saved for a whining-about-interfaces post probably over on my dev blog.

Because this post is about the idea that started with this + this

Twitter / Mathieu Tozer: what it comes down to with ...

Twitter / Mathieu Tozer: they do everything,and noth...

Brian Caldwell, another plasqer then skyped me a bit of facebook support. The key part is in italics:

Brian Caldwell 12:42 PM
i'm not sure it fair to lump myspace and facebook together
Mathieu Tozer 2:04 PM
Hehe
2:04 PM No, but I was thinking very high level
2:04 PM facebook is better
2:04 PM esp with the relatively recent opening of it with the API

2:10 PM But the whole phenomenon has been irking me for a while, and I couldn't put my finger on it. And in a brain busting hungover state as I walked down to my fav cafe, I think I worked out why

2:13 PM It's a personal thing of course, and clearly I'm in the minority, but facebook and myspace has a lot of structure for unused features which creates noise and drowns out the message - ie, my status messages, or photos. The content is lost in the structures holding up all the unused features. I prefer the assembling together of the parts that you need from single purpose services that work well by themselves.
2:13 PM I think I feel better now (hangover gone too)

So, my point is that facebook and myspace have a lot of structure sitting around for unused features which create noise and drown out real message - my content and photos.

This happens in both a physical, interface sense, simply by introducing clutter surrounding the message on screen, and also in a cognitive load sense - the 'what are all these things oh it's all just too much' bit. It has to do with a the signal vs noise ratio (also proverbial), and, getting back to my original thought, designing single purpose 'scalpels'.

I suppose I have to back up this with examples now don't I. Well:

The parts I do care about: status messages, photos, and personal messages to me, aren't really all that visible! I also have superior social services for these things already, like twitter, flickr, and email, and for the public things, I have a blog to tie them all together. There's no noise. The one thing this composition of services, which forms my online presence, lacks, is the 'friending' part, especially on the scale with which myspace and facebook have got. My own mother added me as a friend on facebook for gods sake!

So, what it comes down to for me is this

The messaging model, the photo galleries, and status messaging system are all crap - but what facebook is good at is the linking of people. So what I would like to see is facebook being the linking 'face' to all my other services, and allow me to remove from my 'page' the thigs I don't want to see / use and push up content from my other services into the page.

And as myspace goes out of fashion, people whinge about having to switch over to facebook, when it would be a smarter for them to quit storing all their eggs in the one basket and reduce facebook or myspace to a single scalpel - that of a single network linking friends together, and assembling their pages with content from around the web.

Labels: facebook myspace irksome web services social network

Pretty Special

0 comments Published Friday, August 24, 2007 by Mathieu.

Back in 2004 I made a speech for the 35th Annual Japanese Speech Contest for Victoria, and won an originality award. I popped it onto my blog back then, and just now I got this really heart warming Skype message:

Hello
The manuscript of your 2004 argument conference speech contest read.
My husband changed character very.
There was a hint of the solution in your manuscript.
Iwould like to be thankful.
Thank you very much.
はじめまして
あなたの２００４年弁論大会スピーチコンテストの原稿を読みました。
私の夫がとても性格が変わってしまいました。
あなたの原稿の中に解決のヒントがありました。
とても感謝しています。
どうしてもお礼を言いたいです。
どうもありがとうございます。

I replied with:
Mathieu Tozer

きよはらさんへ、メッセイージどうありがとうございます。私のスピーチの中で何かの解決を見つけられてとても嬉しいです。また話したかったら

どうぞお連絡してください

Mathieuより

Labels: speech contest skype heart warming reply

Hey look, its mat!

0 comments Published Sunday, August 12, 2007 by Mathieu.

Hey look, its mat!
Originally uploaded by atariboy

Jeans West Full Image

0 comments Published Tuesday, August 07, 2007 by Mathieu.

Labels: jeans west model

Jeans West

0 comments Published Monday, August 06, 2007 by Mathieu.

Hey look! Here! I'm on a NYC _BILLBOARD_.

http://www.jeanswest.com.au/

*wink*

WHAT I USE

0 comments Published Friday, August 03, 2007 by Mathieu.

In order to consolidate what my PIM things are, here is a definitive list of
WHAT I USE

Ahem,

Note Taking: booq, a custom application I wrote to function as a capture of ideas and todos, but only really used for notes.
Bookmarks: del.icio.us and google reader sharing
Blogging: blogger
Todos and GTD: Omnifocus
Shared Documents: Google Documents for
Tickets: Trac for work project related tasks
RSS reading: google reader
I use twitter to answer the question "What are you doing?" throughout the day
Instant Messaging: skype and sometimes AIM
Photos: Flickr, mySkich, iPhoto
Workout Log: Sheaf, another custom application
Spreadsheets: Google docs

Sometimes I feel uncomfortable with the solutions I use , I've felt this way since I started making software. There's always the feeling of 'well that's not how I would have done it' . Trying to get over it and make the best of what is out there. I can't invent everything.

Labels: applications