MySpace has never been know for its simplicity or usability. Fortunately for users they were trying to do something about it. Unfortunately for MySpace those documents leaked online. MySpace was seeing poor install and retention rates for their apps compared to Facebook and hired a usability team to make some web design and user experience recommendations. It’s more pixel pushing than redesign, but a very interesting look into one do the largest sites on the web and how they strive to improve their business.
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Posts Tagged ‘facebook’
Four major Facebook Upgrades
Friday, September 11th, 2009Over the last 24 hours Facebook has made four important announcements. Not shy about going head to head with Apple’s music announcements (or Twitter) they announced Facebook Lite, @replies, a Facebook Desktop Notifier for Mac and Tornado an open source framework for real-time web services.
Facebook Lite
Facebook Lite launched in the US and India, as a scaled down version of the Facebook without the clutter. They have removed everything from the interface except a users stream, profile, events and inbox. Profile pages even more closely resemble Twitter, showing just a status feed and links to wall, info, friends and photos & video. No mafia wars. No zombies. Just an elegant, paired down interface showing you the the basics for communication on Facebook. To check out Facebook Lite, click here.
@replies
While Facebook Lite is arguably in response to Twitter, the inclusion of @replies in Facebook is an obvious clone. You can now include your friend’s names in your status updates as “@friend name” and Facebook will remove the “@” and link your friend’s name to their profile. The advantage over Twitter is (theoretically) the auto fill feature that Facebook has implemented, that I have yet to see work in Safari. Check out the Facebook blog post on @replies.
Facebook Desktop Notifier for Mac
Facebook has released a beta version of Facebook Notifications for Macs. Facebook Notifications is a desktop application that will alert you to what Facebook calls “interesting ativity. Small, unobtrusive messages will pop-up on your machine to alert you, and you can deep link to important sections of the Facebook site through the app. Get the app (Mac only) here.
Open Source Friendfeed’s realtime tech
Last, but by no means least, Facebook has opened up a piece of the core technology behind their recent acquisition, FriendFeed. They released Tornado, a real-time web framework written in Python that will allow users to interact with thousands of simultaneous connections at once. You can find out more about the Tornado framework here.
New Facebook Badges
Monday, September 7th, 2009Over the past year or so Facebook has slowly been opening up more and more of their platform, making baby steps towards allowing all of a users data to be used on other websites. Earlier this week they opened up a little more, but this time releasing badges for the non-developer community. For personal accounts there is a profile badge as well as a photo badge allowing users to share profile information and selected photos on other websites using easy to implement embed code. For businesses there is a fan box, live stream box and a page badge. The Fan box allows people to become your fan or view your page stream, the live stream box allows users to post messages in real time and the page badge functions similar to the profile badge but for businesses. Check out all of the widgets on Facebook or see an implementation of the two personal widgets for my page below.
