I wrote earlier about the degree to which MySpace sucks as a model for staying in touch. Truth is, I really don’t care. MySpace is in it purely for profit, so it only makes sense that they’d try to confuse the hell out of their users while assaulting them with ads. That’s my perspective, at least.

Not everyone sees it my way, though. We get the “how does facebook do it?” question all the time. The answer is typically, “they do it wrong,” but I get the thought process behind the question. One would only assume that social networks have built their [user] experience around [user] behavior and that popularity demonstrates a successful implementation of [user] interface.

So, I give you MySpace, the most popular social network. Its user interface is most definitely not built around user behavior. Requiring 6 – 21+ clicks to send a friend a message should be sufficient proof of that.

Think facebook is any better? Nope. They just save you the effort of looking for the log in form by requiring you log in before you do anything at all.

So, the next time you find yourself asking how the popular sites “do it”, step back and also ask how you should be doing it. I like to think the latter is the better question.

Moral of the story: beware what you clone. We’ve all seen Multiplicity.

Related to the moral of the story: man, I wish I had my copy of Multiplicity with me last weekend while I was getting coffee.

So we’re winding down what Newsweek predicted would be the Year of the Widget. I don’t think it played out that way, but maybe I missed something. (Like predictions being worth reading.)

If there ever was any real widget momentum underway, it crashed when facebook kicked open the Platform. (Feel free to hit me in the comments for using facebook and open in the same sentence.)

I didn’t like the use of the platform label when Zuckerberg first declared it. But 10,000+ facebook apps make the use difficult to dispute.

I’m not typing on the virtues of facebook here. Personally, I think the thing sucks – all ur bits r belong to facebook. But we definitely feel the significance of the facebook platform a hell of a lot more than any supposed widgetization of the web. (This coming from a work request point of view.)

Enough talk of the borg. The idea that we’re declaring working models is far more significant. Let’s example in on Twitter again. Popular opinion holds it as a working model. So, rather than build a standalone app to track iou’s, why not grab on to the API and drop a new publishing rule into the existing ecology?

I like platforms. Experimentation gets easier. It’s not the new way of doing things, it’s another way. The web is gaining sophistication.