a Facebook redesign's impact

In my industry I just realized it is easy to mess with the actual lifestyles of another person that uses your site or application on a regular basis. Social Networking site Facebook recently changed the way they lay out their site to rearrange the "friends" tab that is at the top of the page. The Friends tab used to have a dropdown menu that would allow the user to view friends' status updates as default, but then clicking other subtabs see their friends' recently updated items (such as info, photos, about me information) and more than just the status updates. When I would log on to facebook I would frequently have interest in seeing who had new photos or new content on their page. Now, with this piece eliminated I can no longer keep up with those things. All I am forced to view is who is doing what at the moment, very much so like tweeting with Twitter. All of this, of course is located on their 'home' page that you arrive at on login and is the default, so to me unless I'm searching for additional friends or trying to link up/find people facebook suggests to me that they know, I find the tab in it's entirety useless. The users have always expressed a dislike to change or the new features of a newly released version of the site. There have even been groups with millions of users or polls out there where people expressed outrage at the site's numerous changes. How to combat this one might ask?

Solution: Make the entire site customizable like iGoogle and the new ESPN.com. Facebook touched on this feature with the addition of the bottom bookmarks bar when they launched chat, but why not make it for the entire site? All of the information is there, it is just aggregated at different points on different pages on the site. Similarly the way notifications of such things are already handled, so why can't complete customization of one's facebook interaction be possible? If I like my layout all in Pirate language (a feature added when they added additional international networks about a year ago) then why not let me customize that amongst other things.

A completely customizable and INDIVIDUAL facebook interaction and experience for each INDIVIDUAL and different person. Seems to me like a great idea. Why should anyone have to mimic the things they use their social networking for, albeit club promoters just concerned about the events section, or people like myself who truly are there to connect with each other and keep up to date with their friends. I'm not saying make a myspace, by ANY means. Leave the way the profiles are laid out standard and do not allow users to have HTML-based pages and profiles, Just the way the actual menubar is set up and one navigates those pages needs to be customizable. Imagine an Adobe application. I'm a designer, recently I have been doing many shirt designs and layouts. Well, I use a few tools and filters based on the difficulty in printing with screens as is necessary on t-shirts. I have a customized 'workspace' of toolbars and the like that I have saved for shirts. Similarly when I do work for web, I load in a different workspace. I can easily see facebook working the same way, but having drag and drop toolbars or links that I can personally arrange for my facebook usage.

Just my $.02

Simpler Lifestyles

hippies - i get it. their simplistic lifestyle. Hear me out now, I'm not crazy. I just unloaded my stuff from the washer and put in the dryer, and where we live we have a little like nook that has dirt on top of it because it's almost a crawl space. While unloading from washer and transferring to dryer it has to pass by and over this nook and tyipcally in a load, you average about 1 sock or boxer pair (wet of course) into that dirt and requires rewashing because it fell.

Today, was the first time in me living here i had no casualties to the dirt mound and that put a smile on my face. It's those little things hippies appreciate that they can value and feel good about to just change their mood. For the rest of the world its material things or money and then even then they're not satisfied or as happy as the hippies. Whereas at times if you take a step back and just appreciate the little things, like someone's gorgeous smile or the beauty in a pair of eyes, just appreciating what you have or those people or simple sentiments around you that make you feel special. It is these little things that can make us feel a million times better in an instant without even really spending a dollar.

Just interesting to think about.

My demographic in my industry

This past spring I took a course with Professor Celia Pearce on Expreimental Design. It was LCC 4730 at Georgia Tech and was project based primarily. All of our project turn-ins were to be posted to a class blog on typepad located here. That sort of inspired me to write a blog because of the things that I began actually thinking about when I got to doing some of the reading, another part of the course. While wirting that I realized something about my demographic in the industry I am in, so I thought I'd pull an excerpt from that here.

"One of the unique things about digital media is that its affordances, countless in number, are actually unique to this form of new media. There are affordances available only to digital media that are not to non-digital media. The unique aspect about digital media is that it allows the artist to creatively express themselves in an alternative world or space in which they can generate theoretically anything and take on any persona (See my Project 3). An element exclusive to those in this industry or even students such as ourselves studying these practices have an opportunity to be at the cutting edge of the industry and shape the way this virtual world changes or progresses. This cannot be said with other mediums. With for example newspaper or regular publishing print mediums, those studying a major such as journalism do not have nearly the amount of freedom or expression in their respective fields."

Welcome to 'Techie Two Cents'

Last weekend I posted a reallly lengthy blog-type writeup on what was important to me and on my appreciation of Sports. This blog can be found here on Facebook (can only see it if you are a friend).

Anyways, I got some really good feedback from it and truly enjoyed writing it just thinking pretty profoundly at a pivotal point in my life. I am set to graduate Georgia Tech with a major in Computational Media in December and a minor in Marketing. Recently I finished my spring semester and got to thinking what I really want to do in the working world when I am out. I thought I'd start this blog to not only learn more about web 2.0 and the social interaction, but actually get to thinking and reflecting on some of my decisions and things in my life right now. Most of this stuff I figure might be pretty technology related or just deep observations about the things that keep my mind up at night or feel I have to jot down. I want to customize the design and of course as a designer make it my own, better, so look for that soon.

With that in mind, I LOVE Georgia Tech so expect a lot on that, and that's where the name came from sorta with "Techie" and they're my thoughts, hence the $.02