To this day, I do not understand why people moved from MySpace to Facebook, honestly. MySpace profiles were highly customizable (plus it taught 13-15 year olds HTML and CSS, something no social network does anymore), the interface was much nicer than Facebook’s, and it was very easy to navigate.
I have a real issue with both social networking and instant messaging today. Firstly, in my eye, Facebook was old from the beginning. It should already be dead. It’s ugly, it’s bland, and too many people are too addicted to it. They keep bringing out crap that somehow people magically want after seeing it, like Facebook Home. Nobody truly wants to replace their home screen on their phone with pictures from Facebook. Can you imagine the kind of crap you’ll see? Poorly photoshop-ed memes reposted from Tumblr which were reposted from either 4chan or reddit. Low resolution photos from people who don’t know the first thing about using a camera, and highly filtered photos re-shared from Instagram! I just do not understand.
Twitter, while being very nice to look at, is degrading itself very quickly. The moment it bought TweetDeck and turned it into a horrible, less-than-functional mess, I knew what was to come. Before being bought, TweetDeck was my absolute favourite application on my computer. I would always have it running, usually fullscreen on my second monitor, and it was my main source of information coming from 5 twitter accounts, Facebook, MySpace, and at least 3 or 4 other social networks. It was beautifully designed, fully functional, and even had fancy, grouped, desktop notifications. Twitter itself started off nicely, then added nice improvements like inline images and videos (although they removed Instagram functionality, which really ruins the experience, as a large amount of people share from Instagram to Twitter), and a simple, to-the-point interface. Now they’re exploring #music and probably something else that doesn’t suit them.
Next, i’m going to move on to instant messaging. MSN/Windows Live Messenger will always be the best, cleanest, and most functional messaging client out there. It did what it was supposed to do, and did it in a way that was never annoying or in the way. Now what are we stuck with? Skype, which has always been an ugly, unorganised mess (which has been added on as they’ve stuffed in Microsoft contacts, Facebook friends and a bunch of other things that don’t suit the Skype interface), and is only getting worse. We also have the very ugly and in-the-way Facebook desktop chat client (which I would never in a thousand years want to install). And what else? Nothing. Just nothing.
Here’s what I’ve started to see myself doing. I never have Skype running, instead I have an IRC client that is always somewhere on one of my screens, helping me keep an eye on my server without being in the way. I’ve also started using Myspace again, especially because it’s even more beautiful than it used to be (although we’ve lost the full profile customization we once had, which is a shame). You guys let me know when you’ve come to your senses.
