Comments on: Staying in touch

By: Aaron Mentele

Aaron Mentele — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:07:40 +0000

Hey DL. You’re forgetting the first step: fire up that circus (go to the site). And at 5 steps, you’re looking at this from the perspective of a proficient user. I won’t split hairs with you for 2 steps, though. It’s a mess either way.

Here’s my point: just because myspace or facebook does something doesn’t make it right. It’s more often the contrary. Neither serves as a process to emulate.

By: DL

DL — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:57:19 +0000

Hi Aaron-

I don’t think the examples are fair.

In example 1, there is a link to message the person on the MySpace search results pages, so is only 4 steps, not 7: search, click send message, login, write message. Compare with Facebook: search, click send message, login (they kick you back to home page to login just like MySpace), after login, they dump you back to search page where you have to click send message again, write message. So it takes one extra step (5 total) on Facebook to accomplish same thing. Granted MySpace pages are loaded with ads along the way.

Regarding example 2, MySpace doesn’t require you to be friends with the person you are sending a message to. Requiring friendship is a privacy setting users can select. In the default case, it would take the same 4 steps to send a message to someone who wasn’t your friend as in example 1.

By: Aaron Mentele

Aaron Mentele — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:08:55 +0000

Yeah, but MySpace has a lot more “users” too. FWIW, though, I think they’re both sick.

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:58:06 +0000

I recently saw an article on one of the business news sites (sorry lost the reference) trumpeting that MySpace was the most successful social netwoking company. Turns out they were measuring base don page views, and My space had 4x as many page views as Facebook. This kind of shows why they like to keep you clicking.

By: Aaron Mentele

Aaron Mentele — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:20:36 +0000

There’s definitely a strategy behind it. Keep the herd on the run and keep them confused. Eventually you get ad clicks.

By: Corey V.

Corey V. — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:52:39 +0000

I have ceased to believe that MySpace even cares about usability. They want you to wander off; actual productivity of any kind, be damned!

They will continue to sell ad space because a good chunk of marketing executives are just now catching up with the MySpace/Social Network idea. They say “Hey, let’s be edgy. PUT AN AD ON MYSPACE!” And as long as MySpace is continuing to make money through these clueless execs, by fix what’s broken?

Sorry. I’ll go back to my little corner now.