There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with using social media like Twitter and Facebook to get people to participate in contests, but Cameron Moll’s nickname for the recent Authentic Jobs contest does raise an interesting point.
You won’t win through frivolous activities such as retweeting, posting a comment, or Facebookery. You’ll win by actually using Authentic Jobs in a way that benefits you. Use the site to set yourself up to find a job or land some freelance work anytime between now and December 4, and you’re automatically entered to win.
The contest makes its participants discover the product it’s promoting. Sure, retweeting and refacebooking to win prizes does spread the buzz, but if you’re confident enough in what you’ve built, it will do the talking. And so will its satisfied customers on Twitter and Facebook.
Plus, it helps to have fabulous prizes at stake.
Does your insanely brilliant product have to shun the marketing machines of Twitter and Facebook? Of course not. But you can always be a little more creative with your promotions, can’t you?
I don’t think that Simler will be a Facebook or Twitter killer, but there are several features that interest me enough to not stop thinking about it. (That’s gotta be a good sign right? Knowing how that went for Twitter?)
- Instead of reading and discussing topics with your friends because they are your friends, Simler lets you find the topics (tags) that interest you, so you can consume and create content under them. You could say it’s a reformatted message board or chatroom, so is it really a new thing?
- The tagging concept keeps me on the fence as well. I like the idea of trying to define yourself with these keywords, but the novelty wears off when you realize it’s not much different from the way we list interests in virtual profiles and slambooks. And what does it mean when I add the IE6 tag to my profile? It definitely does not mean I like using it! What about the “Awkward Silence” tag? Eventually it will become a race to see who comes up with the wittiest name.
- I’m not sure it will actually scale. Will there be a way to organize the tags a user collects as time passes? Surely some people’s egos will find anything less than a thousand tags to be insufficient to describe their interesting selves. Then again, the Twitter era answer to that is: when there’s an API, there’s a way.
Simler poses interesting questions regarding how we pursue our interests on the Web. Do you join groups because your friends are in it? the cool kids are in it? or because you’re interested in the discussions? Are you tired of the insipid updates filling up their live streams? Should you take a more active role in choosing the content you see? Is the level of control for doing so enough?
Just about the time it’s become almost trivial to create rounded corners, Facebook suddenly decides to go back to its originally boxy, “razor cut” look. In the announcement, the Facebook design team reveals its priority:
Since we introduced rounded corners to Facebook, their consistent use has been spotty at best. The corner radii vary, and it sometimes feels arbitrary which corners are rounded and which are not. Additionally, they add an extra layer of complexity to the code (note: IE, please add support for border-radius).
As part of the effort to simplify our visual style, the design team recently decided to go back to our square corner roots. In doing so, we hope to champion cleanliness and the razor cut look that Facebook is known for.
That’s choosing consistency over the popular choice to go with rounded corners just because it’s a recommended design pattern. Not everybody would have the guts to do that.
Heck, it takes guts for Facebook to keep tweaking its interface, because at each turn it’s spurned so many protesting groups that keeping track of which one is against which feature becomes futile. For all we know, new groups protesting this rollback will surface yet again.
But Facebook always knows what it wants, it seems, and always sticks to its guns. Given the current design trends—from “Web 2.0″ gradients, candy colors, large fonts, and rounded corners, to Apple-inspired interfaces, to the highly detailed grunge and Victorian textures—would you, as a hypothetical head of the Facebook design team, have come up with something like its current look? Or would you have changed it? Save for the already-gone rounded corners, people wouldn’t have pegged this site for a spawn of the Web 2.0 era. It didn’t feel the need to look like one. Its features already spoke volumes.
Let’s talk feature redesign. The most controversial one so far, which put the status updates on the homepage, has also redesigned the social networking design pattern as a whole. It’s not just a copycat of the Twitter or FriendFeed (which it just acquired) interface, but emergence of the Real Time Web had a lot to do with it.
Back in the glory days of MySpace and Friendster, Facebook had a chance to copy its ability to ultra-customize profiles with custom CSS and background images. And there was a time when FB’s apps messed up profiles that things almost looked as horrible as any MySpace or Friendster page, but Facebook once again swept in and prioritized consistency. Over total freedom.
Facebook always seems to be choosing the unpopular, unconventional path, but it’s now the most popular social network on the planet, and the 3rd most popular site in the world second only to Google and Yahoo! They must be doing something right.
Everything old seems to be new (and hip?) again. And I’m not too sure I’m happy about it.
Short URLs
Shorter URLs are all the rage these days because of Twitter and its 140-character limit. If you’re one of the top sites on the web is practically mandatory for you to roll out your own URL shortening system. Ars Technica, for example, whose official URL is arstechnica.com, also has arst.ch. If you’re on a CMS like WordPress, you’re advised to give out the post ID permalink instead of the keyword-rich permalink of your blog post for the same reason.
Not too long ago, SEO and usability experts were on the same side and recommended readable URLs. Now that Twitter is the new internet marketing (I think they call it social media now) battlefield, the rules changed. When the next killer Web 3.0 app comes out, will we compromise and adjust once again?
But then again, has the Web ever stood still? Maybe I just thought it was beginning to.
WebKit’s CSS animations and scrollbars
You can now style scrollbars and perform animations using CSS in WebKit browsers.
I remember when Internet Explorer started to support scrollbar styling and almost every personal site took advantage of it. But then they grew out of it and were told by the gurus not to mess with the browser chrome.
I also remember <blink> and <marquee>.
But then again, “styling scrollbars isn’t messing with the chrome anymore than styling a button is.” Would the world be a saner place if browsers behaved the same way and all looked alike?
DiggBars
Digg has come out with its own version of the external page framing mechanism which they call the DiggBar.
Said mechanism is nothing new, and never really died out even to be considered a comeback, but Digg has a powerful following by all that which is noisy in the blogosphere to build a considerable amount of buzz. And no matter how you look at it, framing external pages is still framing, reminiscent of the era when HTML framesets were considered cool.
But then again, perhaps in this new era listening to the clamor of the crowd is no longer a fluke, but a very real way to improve one’s business.
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