Beginning at the end of last week, Facebook rolled out an interface change across its network. This change was ostensibly designed to improve Facebook's usability.
Unfortunately, I found this redesign to completely fail that mission. The new Facebook has increased the feeling of overload that its users must experience, it is visually cluttered beyond that, and it brushes off important usage conventions.
One of the more prominent slogans under which the Cybervangelists have rallied in the past decade is "Information wants to be free." The arguments for it are compelling; the spread of knowledge is notoriously hard to prevent and in general costs of it have been steadily falling since the Renaissance.
However, despite what the those heralds would like to believe, there remains a very real cost of creating information. It takes time. It takes plane tickets and video cameras and food. These things have costs, and, until the Singularity strikes, they will continue to have costs.
The netbook craze has hit the markets. The recent weakening of spending in the U.S. and other industrialized nations has had consumers looking for ways to save money, and they found the computing world's new brainchild, netbooks, and set to work eating them up.
Under Consideration's Brand New has released a year's end roundup of the best and worst logo designs to grace 2009. Slotting in at the third worst was the new logo for Xe, the rebranded Blackwater Worldwide.
Certainly Blackwater deserves a severe degree of public derision for the conduct of its employees in the 2007 Baghdad shootings. Nothing excuses the murder of innocent civilians.
Popular social networking site Facebook has recently introduced a significant change to its home page, replacing the news feed with a "Live Feed". This new feature spawned a significant number of user-created groups protesting the change. In response, a group was created calling itself "I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE," satirizing those users who simply wanted facebook's home page to stay the same.
After years of lurking around, I finally signed up for an account on Everything2. So far, I'm having a great time with the site.
But one day in the catbox (to non-noders: chatbox) a very well-established noder posted that Everything2's real problem is that none of its users know what it is. Is this true? Perhaps. It would be folly to say that E2 is a simple place. But I'm going to try and give my idea of what it is.
E2 is people.
