Digg Users Create Next MySpace?

duggspaceFrom Digg :Inspired by Kevin Rose’s $200 investment, and its success, I ask this: Can the collaborative social news phenomenon Digg.com inspire the rapid development of a MySpace-like social network created, collaboratively, by Digg users (designers, programmers, beta testers), using open source web infrastructure?

read more | digg story

My answer : Why the hell not?

But to create something that will challenge Myspace will be something abit special. MySpace is trying do what Microsoft does; be everything to everybody, but in MySpace’s case it seems to be a working formula.

What exactly is wrong with MySpace?
MySpace UK Home

As much as MySpace is trying to be everything to everybody its still not being the be all and end all in web 2.0 to me and many others, I still don’t have a MySpace and will probably never get one.

I aren’t denying that MySpace can be a powerful tool but it is a melting pot for extremes, People with 3000+ friends (its physically impossible without the web to have a group of friends that big the maximum is about 100 for an average person) and then theres all the bad press it gets because of children being exploited through the network. If they’d have thought of that when they started out they could have put some policies even some code to help prevent it.
MySpace Music
Then there is the fact the whole site is just messy, theres ads all the place and theres little in the way of easily accesible content. Why do all these so called “web2.0” sites, use very “web 1” ads, subtle ads win the day. Apart from the ads mucking up the design they just are irrelevant and people are so used to them they are ignored so why even bother putting them in? find another way to make money.

Keep It Simple Stupid ~ KISS
Why is it so complicated to find what you want on myspace apart from the ads, and why do they feel the need to replicate links and content images all over, A simple Menu system, maybe with a bit of AJAX magic would make it so much more bearable. Also the music player on peoples profile gets on my nerves why does it insist on playing on load, let the user on the end to decide.

Whilst I think that personalizing web-pages is good, personalizing MySpace pages is all wrong, MySpace should give the ability to this within there system that way they can keep everything cohesive and understandable no matter what page your on.

So That’s What I Think
I tried to be objective and it looks as if a manage it a bit but not enough. It may seem like I am just taking MySpace simply because I don’t like it, but it’s not that at all I think MySpace is successful at what it does and should inspire people to see what they can do with an idea and some coding knowledge, but as with all thing I seriously think that it can be done a lot better, and the real question is why can’t we do it better and be creative with it too.

What of Web 2.0?

It seems the web is becoming more and more obsessed with the new terms that pop-up everywhere ‘web 2.0’ , ‘AJAX’ , ‘Rails’. Sometimes with little thought to what they actually mean to what is going on. Its all well and good providing a nice looking site to sit on but unless you have the content to work with it you may struggle getting the site off the ground.

What about web standard and accessibility, I know this site isn’t perfect but I am always working on making it better for everybody to access (whether they will or not is neither here not there). Simple things like putting alt tags in images(at this moment only two images are missing this on the entire site) and titles in links can make a lot of difference, and if you design websites for a living it should be second nature. For me I have to work at although the developing side of things is getting a lot easier (so practice really does make perfect)

So I was talking about web 2.0, so back on topic. I think on the whole far too much on how people judge sites is now based on where are the fancy effects and wheres the 2.0 features (I have fallen pray to this with jacktams.co.uk) but it would be quite easy to go way overboard and just make it horrible to use, which leads nicely onto MySpace.

If you read deeper into my archives you will probably see my dislike for MySpace and it isn’t because of what its for, but the way its done, everything seems to be half baked and saturated with ads (another pet hate) and instead of focusing on what they are good at and making that even better and easier to grasp (then reducing the ads) they diversify. We should have already learned from the likes of Sony that going out and trying to become everything to everybody doesn’t work specializing on what you have got and your good at wins in the end.

Technologies are rapidly converging and creating new forms of media podcasting for example, the iPod is only 5years old, and video blogging even blogging, then you have blogging from a phone, PDA, just ringing a number and posting, but mistakes made the first time around (i.e. web 1.0) could happen all over again, if we don’t start including the fixes now.

AJAX and web 2.0 aren’t the be all and end all, good specialized and accessible content will always win, and a good design may come second to that and AJAX etc are just the icing on the cake.

The Code Makes Sense

I have never really considered myself as a programmer, more of a shift and make the code work person. Having done a fair bit VB (gasp a mac user using windows) I am finding that I am picking up coding a lot quicker and also finding it easier to modify things mainly this website.

Whilst the theme itself is great there are things I want my way as such the theme your are looking at is a rapid departure from the original code in places and equally the same in others. I am about a quarter of the way through a book on AJAX and a third of the way through reading the Ruby on Rails books I bought a while back and will probably re-read them because I wasn’t too sure about programming the first time around (and also because I tried to jump in the deep end)

I took me awhile to get the Portfolio image rotator to work properly on my server from the download, but something happened that never has happened before, I understood what the code was doing without reading into how it works in the first place I could see that it called a style-sheet that I didn’t work so I modified it and it worked, it took all of 20 minutes, something that would usually take me a weekend to get my head around.

We have AJAX

I have just completed the update to the theme on jacktams.co.uk, I am now running the latest version of K2 and Unsleepable with my mods on top.

And as you will probably see as you browse around there is some nice AJAX improvements that K2 brings to WordPress. I am still working on some finishing touches but I am very pleased with the new theme since I now have got it to work by deleting all the K2 records from the options database.