Great observation in your last paragraph. We do a lot of user research where we recruit people to use our products and provide feedback (we might as well be testing with monkeys). Problem with this is that it is artificial; because emotionally and financially the prospects are not invested.

Testing can only tell you so much, it doesn’t give you real emotional context. You can only learn that by launching a product and then learning whether you hit the mark in connecting with your users — then you iterate until you get it. By and large, My Space is a good concept that did a lot of things right. Emotionally it connected with it’s audience, regardless of the design.

this is a though-provoking post.

i think that good designers has always this artsy side, which makes them disconnected from the pack.

also, because myspace is the #1 destination on the internet, does this article imply that web designers have to open an account in myspace?

As a web developer I signed up for MySpace and Facebook as soon as I heard about them to see what the buzz was about; but since most of my friends were neither geeks nor in college, they never got much use.

Recently, I joined a community theatre group which lead to interaction with a set of talented high-school kids, none of whom I’d consider “friends” per say, but one of them found my facebook page. Within a week I was added to all of their friends lists. I was fascinated. It drove a decent amount of traffic to my website, not the target audience, but traffic none the less.

Of course now I’m the creepy 20-something on facebook with all the teenage friends, but I guess it’s a decent proof of concept for social marketing, and a fascinating view of a more or less invisible culture.

Eric…love the phrase “invisible culture”!

That’s exactly it…it’s the culture that’s hidden, not the life, per se.

@qp…I agree with everything that you said, up until the last sentence.

It is my conviction that this is all part of design…that the decisions about what social features to add, how to connect users, and how to enable “invisible culture” (to use our new term), is all about design.

Now, if you were talking about visual design, then I still agree 100%.

Great post. Amusingly enough, my company, with it’s latest release yesterday, has a (very)beta product rolling out, which allows users to create their own health pages, uploading videos, images, and other “snippets” from our site and around the web.

It was developed without much design resources, and as a designer, it’s been fascinating to watch the product evolve. Everyone sees the power of the technology, but a few on the design team struggle to embrace the project, meanwhile, nearly everyone else, while they struggle with it and realize it’s needs work, they are nonetheless thrilled with it, and I’ve seen people in the office til 10pm working on 5 or more personal pages because it’s such a powerful tool of expression for them.

A few examples:
http://www.revolutionhealth.com/pages/jill-macneice-s-buteyko-page

http://www.revolutionhealth.com/pages/weight-a-minute–the-procrastinators%E2%80%99-diet-club

http://www.revolutionhealth.com/pages/type-ii-diabetes

I think, as it is with Myspace, that we as designers, technologists, etc, have our standards rightfully set high, but most people just want to be able to express themselves, have their voice heard, and feel like they’re connecting with others, and are not too concerned if the tools are don’t align themselves to the exact pixel, etc.

As a designer at Rev, I’m fascinated to see how this tool evolves, and how design can involve itself in project (hence, one of the reasons I subscribe to this blog).

One of my favourite entries.

I’m sorry, but social network websites are overrated. People need to get out there and get some fresh air. I worry for my generation.

@ Seyora: Yes social network websites are overrated but unless you move with the times of life and web design.

I agree with you btw but MySpace and even Virb are a thing of the present. Yesterday it was computer games and before that it was drugs and rock n roll etc.

btw just for the record I have some thoughts on MySpace and also Virb if you wanted to follow them hear.

this is simiar to the experience I’ve had with Twitter. On first blush, it seems like an overly simplistic and unnecessarily noisy application. But once you experience the connections that it creates it becomes a very different experience.

For me, this says a lot about the way that we should be approaching ‘testing’ applications like this. It’s certainly not a traditional 1hr usability test in a lab with a brand new user that’s going to help identify whether or not social sites are working.

Josh, what’s interesting in your example is that it sounds soooo familiar to anyone who was on AOL a few years ago or really pre-1997 to be exact.

AOL was a community bastion. You didn’t have the web of networks presented like in MySpace or other social apps today. But while lower in fidelity if you will, the experiences are really the same.

This is why I have always said that the success of MySpace and Facebook is b/c AOL failed and nothing more or less. If AOL sustained its energy and evolved, it could have been great, but it went the media/content route and forgot about its core content creators, their users.

Oh Welll! loose and learn, they should hope.

– dave

I signed up for myspace a month or so ago because everyone i worked with pushed me to do it. so i did and everyone became friends with me but i got bored fast im barley ever home to answer my phone no less spend my time watching stupid clips that really have nothing to do with anything. anyway i probably have a milion messages right now and ill probably never check again.

This is a little bit outside of what you’re getting at but what generated the same reaction in me wasn’t meeting a MySpacer but reading Danah Boyd’s blog. She’s a PhD student at Berkeley who specialises in studying teenagers and their use of social networks like MySpace. If you want to see how important social networks are to the next generation in terms of their social lives I highly recommend hitting it up.

If you are interested in gay sex please send to me at:

chadbartlett@mac.com