myspace – ./jack.sh

January 22, 2007

Digg Users Create Next MySpace?

From Digg :Inspired by Kevin Rose’s $200 investment, and its success, I ask this: Can the collaborative social news phenomenon Digg.com inspire the rapid development of a MySpace-like social network created, collaboratively, by Digg users (designers, programmers, beta testers), using open source web infrastructure?

read more | digg story

My answer : Why the hell not?

But to create something that will challenge Myspace will be something abit special. MySpace is trying do what Microsoft does; be everything to everybody, but in MySpace’s case it seems to be a working formula.

What exactly is wrong with MySpace?

As much as MySpace is trying to be everything to everybody its still not being the be all and end all in web 2.0 to me and many others, I still don’t have a MySpace and will probably never get one.

I aren’t denying that MySpace can be a powerful tool but it is a melting pot for extremes, People with 3000+ friends (its physically impossible without the web to have a group of friends that big the maximum is about 100 for an average person) and then theres all the bad press it gets because of children being exploited through the network. If they’d have thought of that when they started out they could have put some policies even some code to help prevent it.

Then there is the fact the whole site is just messy, theres ads all the place and theres little in the way of easily accesible content. Why do all these so called “web2.0” sites, use very “web 1” ads, subtle ads win the day. Apart from the ads mucking up the design they just are irrelevant and people are so used to them they are ignored so why even bother putting them in? find another way to make money.

Keep It Simple Stupid ~ KISS
Why is it so complicated to find what you want on myspace apart from the ads, and why do they feel the need to replicate links and content images all over, A simple Menu system, maybe with a bit of AJAX magic would make it so much more bearable. Also the music player on peoples profile gets on my nerves why does it insist on playing on load, let the user on the end to decide.

Whilst I think that personalizing web-pages is good, personalizing MySpace pages is all wrong, MySpace should give the ability to this within there system that way they can keep everything cohesive and understandable no matter what page your on.

So That’s What I Think
I tried to be objective and it looks as if a manage it a bit but not enough. It may seem like I am just taking MySpace simply because I don’t like it, but it’s not that at all I think MySpace is successful at what it does and should inspire people to see what they can do with an idea and some coding knowledge, but as with all thing I seriously think that it can be done a lot better, and the real question is why can’t we do it better and be creative with it too.

October 24, 2006

What of Web 2.0?

It seems the web is becoming more and more obsessed with the new terms that pop-up everywhere ‘web 2.0’ , ‘AJAX’ , ‘Rails’. Sometimes with little thought to what they actually mean to what is going on. Its all well and good providing a nice looking site to sit on but unless you have the content to work with it you may struggle getting the site off the ground.

What about web standard and accessibility, I know this site isn’t perfect but I am always working on making it better for everybody to access (whether they will or not is neither here not there). Simple things like putting alt tags in images(at this moment only two images are missing this on the entire site) and titles in links can make a lot of difference, and if you design websites for a living it should be second nature. For me I have to work at although the developing side of things is getting a lot easier (so practice really does make perfect)

So I was talking about web 2.0, so back on topic. I think on the whole far too much on how people judge sites is now based on where are the fancy effects and wheres the 2.0 features (I have fallen pray to this with jacktams.co.uk) but it would be quite easy to go way overboard and just make it horrible to use, which leads nicely onto MySpace.

If you read deeper into my archives you will probably see my dislike for MySpace and it isn’t because of what its for, but the way its done, everything seems to be half baked and saturated with ads (another pet hate) and instead of focusing on what they are good at and making that even better and easier to grasp (then reducing the ads) they diversify. We should have already learned from the likes of Sony that going out and trying to become everything to everybody doesn’t work specializing on what you have got and your good at wins in the end.

Technologies are rapidly converging and creating new forms of media podcasting for example, the iPod is only 5years old, and video blogging even blogging, then you have blogging from a phone, PDA, just ringing a number and posting, but mistakes made the first time around (i.e. web 1.0) could happen all over again, if we don’t start including the fixes now.

AJAX and web 2.0 aren’t the be all and end all, good specialized and accessible content will always win, and a good design may come second to that and AJAX etc are just the icing on the cake.

September 28, 2006

Web Dependancy

Continuing in my long list of ideas on technological dependancies. I though I would turn my attention to the World Wide Web. Yes the thing you are viewing this on now.

With the web becoming a self-purpetuating cloud of buzz words and ways for us to communicate for free, could we live without it. Simple answer is; NO, we just couldn’t live without the resoruce that is the web.

So why is this? Well a biased look at myself might be a place to start so: I sit a my mac far too long and have often been told to get a life, but every bit of information I could ever want is at hand be it current affairs, or historical information or maybe just what did I put in that e-mail yesterday – its all there, and it even follows me around.

So what of the generation that is not of the internet age, i.e. my parents. So theres my mum who buys and sells on eBay, my dad uses a Powerbook to do the photography stuff he enjoys and casually surfs the net.
My sister is sucked into the IM revolution, the fact I only get messages saying “jack my computers broke how do I fix it?” I don’t really bother with it.

My sister doesn’t have a mySpace account and neither do I, and this is where my problem begins with web 2.0 I like having access to all the breadth of information but I arent interested in the social networking rubbish. We are already to dependant on Computers, and people are getting Fatter and Fatter, but there is, nothing like a face to face conversation with somebody, you can correspond with somebody via e-mail (this is espescially true in business) and like what you hear, but when you actually see the person you don’t after having a face to face conversation, doing everything online cuts out this judgement.

I only see mySpace as a collecting pot for the popular and the unpopular and the people in the middle of the scale just dont fit in with the way the system works, we then have the inherent problems with such a online network which have been widely published but no-one has come up with a solution that works. The actual solution is quite simple, do it in the real world.

Moving on from my rant on mySpace, and on to broader things. The internet is starting to populate every little facet of out lives, I don’t go a morning without checking my emails and reading the latest news online, but also its going further there are fridges that will do your shopping online for you, all you have to do is zap the barcode on the way out from the fridge.

Are we becoming the masters of our on destruction, putting all our things online centralizing everything we are certainly already more at risk to ID theft and fraud. Do we need to become more aware of the security of our details? and should we constantly be thinking online we are at risk?

On the flip side, we benefit in areas putting everything online, by having having everything within reach at any web access point, I can sit down in town and tell my iMac at home to record a film on that night with a click. My phone can alert me when that important e-mail drops in my inbox. Overall I would say I am the worst organized person I know, but having multiple ways to access my data I have so far managed to keep everything going and on-time, especially with college stuff.

I think overall we shouldn’t get paranoid but, we should be ever more aware about how much about us we put online and how many databases we are in and what that data does when it is no longer used. Is it wrong to ask a company like google to remove all you details from there databases (think google Accounts) when you no longer use there service anymore and is there a procedure for this, the UKs data protection act says not, but other countries aren’t so controlling in this regard; just this morning i got 4 e-mails from lycos even though I said remove my details from there database.

Do we need a universal law, on data protection and use on the internet? Would you sleep easier at night?