2007 June

Jun 29 2007
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Facebook: honeymoon over.

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Here here! Jason has an excellent post about Facebook as the new AOL. Its a comparison that people don’t want to admit to being accurate, because AOL is everything that is considered unfashionable amongst the web’s key influencers, whilst Facebook is quite the thing. I must admit this short lived enthusiasm mirrors my own feelings. A couple of months ago I was breathless about it, largely because of its minimalist design. And now I find it pretty amateur and useless, despite its slick appearance. In short, there is something about Facebook that doesn’t feel like its a step forward in the development of the web. Facebook is the new AOL (kottke.org)

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Jun 18 2007
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The Design of Facebook

Posted by | design | No Comments

Almost as many people are going gaga about Facebook these days, as the iPhone and the knee-jerk reaction seems to be to focus the discussion on the ui design, since it is so conspicuously different from Myspace. Myspace is a ‘fugly’ mess, when Myspace was hip amongst the geeks, then fugly was hip. Successful things on the web, it was argued, are about customization and flexibility. The sticker-book-full-of-crap style of Myspace would do better than the stifling control enforced by some graphic design Nazi. Facebook is different, it really is well designed, and now I’m hearing some of the same people who debated the virtues of fuglyness promote facebook. Interestingly, not many people have picked up on the fact that Facebook is as different from what has become the web 2.0 style, as the Myspace style. Web 2.0 sites tend to use a lot of extraneous CSS and HTML to…

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Jun 14 2007
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Apple’s future rests on the keyboard – or lack of it.

Posted by | design | No Comments

NYTimes “If there is a billion-dollar gamble underlying Apple’s iPhone, it lies in what this smart cellphone does not have: a mechanical keyboard.” This pretty much sums it up. Apples nailed the perfect form factor with the iPod (a cigarette packet rather than the disastrous Newton brick). However, things have moved on since, in the world of smartphones and the Blackberry style keyboard beneath screen is ‘good enough’. I feel myself drooling over the iPhone but wishing it had a keyboard. And that seems worrying.

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