Facebook’s director of product design on why websites may be a dying business:
That’s different than the work we were doing in the mid-2000s. We were trying everything — this is the Myspace era — we were just going crazy. I think we had to go through that phase and I think we’re going to go through that phase with [virtual reality]. There’s going to be a bunch of things we’re going to try that will turn out not be the thing we end up with.
When it comes to web and mobile, we’ve passed through that and we’re in a phase where it’s about standardisation. It’s about creating consistent experience.
Standardized experiences.. Isn’t that a little scary though? Or at least vacant individuality and expression?
There’s a vast number of younger people on Tumblr and WordPress who may say otherwise. Some of their sites look as horrid as Geocities sites from the 90s–but they express who they are without worry to the reader’s eyes. I appreciate that.
I know the trend is Facebook. Zuckerberg’s empire watches your every movie and predicts the next. And we seem fine with that. Fully accepting of the limitless amount of surveillance that comes with the Information Age.
Facebook forced us to ditch anonymity in favor of reckless online endeavors where our names and faces are forever associated with asinine comments or unfunny joke memes brewed up on 4Chan.
And standardized.
Every site looks so similar that the similarity is killing websites. Destruction at the hands of cookie cutter designs.
Standardized and bastardized for The future to download.
Modern modern readers, but give me MySpace any day.