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 create round boxes and three dimensional shadow effects with high reflection. This style apes the third generation ‘aqua’ Apple OS.
Browsers inherently work with flat shaded square box model and so does Facebook. In doing so it creates a satisfyingly minimalist look, effortlessly that makes many web 2.0 sites look like they are designed by coders who are trying to hard, rather than designers.
Even if the focus of the design talk may be wrong not to differentiate Facebook with web 2.0 style rather than Myspace, I suspect the real issue is the type of design that people rarely talk about.
The Facebook difference is about software design rather than graphic (or even UI) design, and these things are very different.
And the key piece of software design that makes Facebook work, in my opinion, is its full on embrace of the blog style ‘reverse chronological list’. If one were to pick one of the central design components of the web it would be this, the thing that made single person online diaries become the publishing model for global media organizations online.
Facebook takes a list of friends and creates a personal newspaper spliced together from the actions of people in your network. It goes beyond the early experiments in social networking which started with bare bones links to people, followed by blog like profiles (but for the 99.999% of people who don’t really want or need a blog).
Just as blogging creates a paradigm for collecting your thoughts and pushing them out there in front of the world, Facebook creates a paradigm for collecting everyone else’s thoughts and putting them in front of you. And by doing that it is very well designed in the non superficial sense.