I read on Mashable that Myspace is considering a redesign. We've all been to the cluttered a Myspace page full of music and all kinds of colorful expressions. It's not always pleasant. The author of the article suggests that Myspace needs more than a face lift. He believes that Myspace should follow Facebook's lead and open itself up to a higher level of open source development. That's a start. I believe that Facebook's open source is as much of a problem as it is a solution. Facebook pages with dozens of applications feel like the cluttered Myspace pages. They are also slow to load. Facebook could use a better level of moderation to keep pages from becoming cluttered with corny applications that lose their novelty after a week.  Perhaps a voting device which allows users to vote in upcoming applications that are "questionable".

User centered design is a good start, but users are changing the way they consume digital content in general. People who once read dozens of blogs are finding it easier to subscribe to RSS feeds and get all the information they need from iGoogle or Netvibes. People are opting for aggregation and condensed versions of the stuff they like in order to get more stuff. Social networks are no different. Many people are on more than one social network just like they read more than one blog. Once developers begin creating app versions of Myspace, Facebook, and other social sites for use on iGoogle, there will be less reason to suffer through all the clutter. The user will be in control once again thanks to open source. Advertisers will have to find alternative ways to get into your face. This is happening faster than you think. Facebook and Myspace will become open source applications on a larger all-in-one virtual desktop aggregator that combines RSS, Social media and other online resources. We're less than a year away from this. It will take a few more years to become the norm, maybe it's time to start redesigning advertising revenue models on social networks and social network applications.

 


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