More Meh from O’Reilly
I just read Tim’s latest “remove the web developer and the web gets developed” piece where he comments on the notion that artists’ MySpace pages are often more current and maintained than their regular web pages. Apparently he has just had the shocking epiphany that:
MySpace is actually a kind of blogging platform, too, just a richer one, allowing for a host of additional popular features, including photo and video albums, music sharing, email and instant messaging, and social networking — all pre-configured and ready to roll.
Really that’s actually what it is? I thought it was.. um.. oh wait, that is what I thought it was because that’s what it is. It’d be like saying… Google search is actually a searching platform, too, just a richer one, allowing for page ranking and better search results including photos and videos and news groups! Or Google apps is like a word processing platform, too, just a richer one, allowing for spreadsheets and email and calendaring!
If anyone wasn’t realizing that ease of use was the primary factor in using a site by now, well, you should get to your web2.0’s and see. Simplifying user interface and hiding complexity these are all themes we are seeing again and again on successful sites. Take as much off the user as possible and build it into the backend.
And there’s a conflicting theme - throw in as much as possible. Social networking wants to be all inclusive, it’s easier to go to one place where all your friends are and all your stuff is, having to maintain several profiles is another long running gripe that people have. This is difficult to manage and mildly at odds with the aforementioned, simple as possible. That’s why you have the proliferation of single purpose sites like Digg and Twitter and all inclusive ones like MySpace and bebo.
Here’s another thing, he talks a little bit about Wikipedia’s use as a breaking news source for the Virginia Tech shootings. He suggests that it’s ease of use led to this use. I again have to disagree, its huge audience and open to everyone nature is what led to this. Having run my own small time wiki (which was a bit of custom software in a previous incarnation), I don’t believe that wiki’s are actually easy to use - there’s a short but sharp learning curve for getting into that mix. I know that in my audience when commenting was just a form and adding entries was form based and easy a lot of content was entered, switching to a wiki caused that to drop to close to 0 as commenting and adding content was no longer drop dead simple. A much smaller portion of the audience is able to contribute to the site. On a grand scale like Wikipedia, it’s fine because that small portion is still a ton of people. But to think that wiki’s are easy is, I believe a mistake.
Lastly I won’t deny that the original quote “remove the web developer and the web gets developed, how ironic” (not Tim’s quote) annoyed the hell out of me. If the client has to go to the “web developer” to update content on their site, then that person isn’t a web developer - he’s probably a designer or producer. A web developer would have built a system for them to update the content. You know, just like how myspace has developers building their systems so that people can update their stuff. Just like how wordpress has web developers to build the software that let’s people update their blogs whenever they want.
