Crimson Media Lab

I have finally ventured into the land of myspace and facebook, although the profiles I built are for HRC Boston.

I intend to spend more time on these sites, but, I have to say, I will always prefer face to face contact when meeting people.

I am endlessly fascinated by the popularity of these sites–it is such a phenomenon on one level and then on another level it really was bound to happen eventually. The Berkman Center, (the Group at Harvard that provided me with this blog) had been exploring online social networking well before myspace took off.
I am also amused at the businesses that have popped up just to help people design their myspace pages, and I bet they are quite successful.

It makes me wonder–if I was going to build a social networking web site–how would I want it to be… myspace has such a simple web design really–it is amazing how popular it is. They do get the functionality of their design right and also they got the right people in the beginning, too. As I understand it, myspace became hugely popular initially because pop stars and models had myspaces, which drew in all their fans who wanted myspaces, too. Pretty clever and especially appealing to us younger generations with so much time on our hands to play on the internet.

To me, facebook is really a model of clean, minimalist design. I am quite impressed by it.

I definitely find both myspace and facebook quite inspiring.