The most significant example is the downfall of MySpace, one of the most popular social media platforms of the time. People believed this to be "user frightening" (Gehl, 93) because it was not standardized and people had the ability to alter their profiles any way they wanted. Users feeling confident using sites like this will allow the sites to gain popularity because they're self regulated, and friendlier to everyone. He instills a positive connotation to standardized digital media platforms.
Here is an article written by the former CEO of MySpace and why he believes Facebook became more successful: http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/former-myspace-ceo-reveals-what-facebook-did-right-to-dominate-social-media/
For those who used MySpace, and now use Facebook, which one do you prefer? Did you like that on MySpace, you had the freedom to customize your profile? Or was it too much work to constantly maintain? How does it compare to Facebook, where you just get to personalize a standardized template?
This made me think back to grade 6 and the website Piczo that gave you the ability to create your own website. We would share our website name with the class and everyone would visit each others website. To create it you needed to use code for some things such as changing the colour of a page and so on. For all of us kids, it was really fun to create something of your own, but it would take hours to make one page sometimes. This is why I think MySpace failed in comparison to Facebook. There are people out there that will take the time to create their own page and edited to constantly keep it fresh. But then there are a lot of people that just want to get on to a website and connect with people without having to do any work. This I believe is why Facebook is so successful. It gives people the ability to simply log on and go, they do all the "hard" work for you. It also gives everyone the same profile lay out which keeps things simple for everyone. Everything is in the same place on everyones profile therefore it doesn't matter how tech savvy one is as everyone can find out how to get to ones pictures and always go back to them.
ReplyDeleteI have to say as a user i prefer the uniformity of the Facebook profile. This is especially useful when looking to gain knowledge from another user's profile. Facebook makes it easy to find your friends and learn about their lives through the simplified layout of the site. Although this being said, the Facebook layout seems to be secretive in the settings that it does not want users to change. For example many of the privacy settings are hidden or confusing to users where as with myspace all of the settings were accessible because they were easy to change.
ReplyDeleteI definitely prefer facebook over myspace as it had a more simpler layout. I did not like how you were able to customize your page on myspace because I found it to be very cluttered and it was hard to read the content because the background would be too distracting. Facebook’s code allows us to easily access content and choose whether we like it or not and the buttons are very easy to click and connect with other people. I found myspace to be following bands and celebrities and not really connecting with my friends.
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