Filed under: Web services, Social Software
Facebook gets a face lift
The News Feed basically condenses all the day-to-day information that Facebook power-users would have spent a lot of time clicking around for into a single page, which is essentially the opposite of what MySpace does. MySpace takes advantage of poor design and endless clicks to maximize pageviews at the expense of usability. Facebook seems to have taken a stand against that sort of pageview inflation and made user convenience its first priority. Sorry for hating on MySpace, but it's really refreshing to see someone else do it right.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Christopher Higgins said 10:33AM on 9-05-2006
This new development disturbs me. It reflects the influence that MySpace has on all social networking sites...Facebook just took it to another level. This promotes stalking; EVERYTHING you do is out there for your friends to see, even the ones you added a year ago and forgot to delete after losing touch.
I don't like it.
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Jordan Running said 10:41AM on 9-05-2006
I can certainly relate to your privacy concerns, Christoper, but as I understand it Facebook's News Feeds respect users' privacy settings, which means that any information shown in someone's News Feed was already available to that person elsewhere on the site.
The lesson to be learned here is as old as the web itself: If you don't want people to see it, don't put it online.
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Christopher Higgins said 11:19AM on 9-05-2006
Yes, but not everybody observes those privacy settings. I myself only recently modified my privacy settings (and I don't even remember what I did). I hardly think that the majority of Facebook users (especially the high schoolers) are going to be concerned about privacy (or even know that you can set your privacy on it.)
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Bennington Purcell said 12:05PM on 9-05-2006
AHH!!! Stalker Heaven. This is the begining of the end. I am a dedicated facebook member but this Big Brother has to go. People now seem to enjoy having their daily life tracked by everyone and their parents and employeers. Creepy.
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matt said 1:05PM on 9-05-2006
Yea, just a little wierd. It's kind of a cool feature, but now everyone can see anything that you do on facebook. Not that anything really important happens there anyways...
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Nicholas Bell said 7:39PM on 9-07-2006
Everyone can't see your information if you change your privacy settings. It's not that difficult of a concept.
You'd think college students would be smart enough to figure out privacy settings. It's a pretty visible link.
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