My first website was awesome. A picture of janet Jackson with Hendrix playing the national anthem. Hosted on Geocities.
Creating “web-site-pages”, as my Dad still calls them, was reserved only for nerds. My friends and my girlfriends mother were very impressed.
Then along comes Myspace.
Myspace wasn’t designed to allow the gorgeous plethora of amazing glittery spinning gifs. It was a hack. However, it gave millions of people the ability to create a unique presence on the web. People with no coding experience spent hours decoding CSS, just so they could make their name pink instead of the default black. I was really blown away by it.
Then something began to happen. Just because its unique, doesn’t mean its usable. I could have designed my own car back when I was 15, but I don’t think a 15 foot spoiler and fiberglass wings would have done well on Interstate 80.
Then Facebook catches on…
People realized that Facebook was simpler. It was free of the Myspace auto-play music feature that blasted “Barbie Girl” in your dorm room when you could’t get to the volume knob in time.
The shift from Myspace to Facebook was remarkable. People were willing to give up their uniqueness and become a spreadsheet entry. Granted, Facebook has come a long way, but when the shift happened it was pretty basic.
The challenge: How do you allow people to create something unique, but also usable?
