Chicks Dig Nerds, Right?

Dear MySpace: Don’t become Facebook.

Before I get started, let me first say that I do understand the value of social networking sites.  I think that they will become more and more integrated into society over the next few years.  I just hope someone develops a good one soon.

Right now we have two primary options: MySpace and Facebook.  Both of them have their deficiencies and setbacks, and both of them seem to have camps that clearly prefer one over the other.  No one seems to approach this from a meritocratic perspective.  If they did, I think they’d find that, while MySpace certainly needs some work, Facebook is pretty terrible all around.  It’s terribly over-cluttered, with mostly useless information.  Facebook apps only serve to compound the clutter problem, while adding nothing useful to the mix.  The whole concept is broken.

MySpace, while not spectacular, is at least mostly clean, most of the time.  This leads me to wonder about the decisions behind today’s update, which adds a widget to the middle of the home page that provides updates when your friends add new photos, videos, blog entries, etc.  I tihnk it’s useful information, and I like having it, but what a terrible UI decision.  It could easily be contained in a sidebar item, which could replace some of the existing sidebar.  What’s there now strikes me as nothing but space filling junk that serves no purpose.

Why not take it a step further, though?  In the age of AJAX, there’s no reason it couldn’t be provided as a label that generates a content container window on mouseover.  The label indicates that my friends have updated their content, I mouse over to it, and I get a small overlay that shows me who updated and what they added.  It’s pretty trivial to implement, and it serves to declutter the UI nicely.

Ultimately that needs to be a primary goal in the development of any application, social networking included.  If MySpace and Facebook can’t seriously declutter and decruft their user interfaces, someone else is going to come along with some New Hotness and replace them.

Hell, I might just do it myself.