Facebook gives you the option to delete and move apps

Facebook in my opinion has never been the most user friendly site, strike that, it’s NOT a user friendly site and it took me awhile to work out how to add and delete various bits of content on my page. To this day I have yet to find out how to change the year of my birthday once it’s in my profile, there’s just no edit or delete button anywhere to be found. If anyone knows, please give me a shout!

But one of the main reasons I gave Facebook my massively uninfluential support in the beginning (it’s rapidly losing it), was because of it’s clean uncluttered look, so different to the seemingly LSD inspired MySpace pages. Not that I ever had or will have a MySpace page. See what happens when the general public gets hold of the design reins. Carnage.

So all was well and good for awhile, until Facebook introduced…applications. Carnage all over again. Users started adding apps left right and center to their profiles and possibly the worst thing about it, was letting users send out mass invites to their ‘friends’ to add the same app. Now, users profiles are becoming so cluttered, it’s hard to find the wall, let alone write on it. Complaints about cluttered profiles and useless apps have finally reached the people who matter at Facebook and very soon they will introducing a “profile clean-up” tool, so you can more easily organise your apps in your profile page. You’ll be able to acknowledge and keep your favourite ones in full view, but store the ones you don’t always use somewhere else where they can be expanded if needed.

I’m sure the people who are developing the apps advertisers won’t take this as good news and frankly I’m not too sure if going to help substantially unclutter profiles. Time will tell. Read the official post on Facebook’s blog.

11 digital forecasts/trends for 2008

Welcome to 2008, may it be a wonderfully crazy digital experience and may all your designs come true. Since everyone is going list crazy with their top 6,7,8,9,10 predictions for the year, I thought I’d swim with the masses this time and give you my top 11 forecasts for the year.

1) Social Networking will continue to be the most talked about digital phenomenon this year. However I feel Facebook’s popularity will decline as it gets too big for its boots too quickly. Personally I feel Facebook is overvalued, over hyped and trying to make too much money too quickly with little consideration for its users. Mark Zuckerberg has recently apologised for it’s Beacon advertising debacle.

2) Mobile (Cellphone) technology will accelerate now that the iPhone has become a reality. One area that Africa is normally ahead of the global community is mobile technology. This is primarily due to the fact that monopolies such as Telkom hold back the internet and people have to find other ways around that. Mobile phones and devices will continue to expand and blur the boundaries beyond just being a phone and more of a tool to update blogs/websites, listen to music, use as a GPS etc. Whatever you do though, do not get a Blackberry! They will NOT make your life easier, they will just make it more stressed.

3) Blogs will continue to grow in relevance in all spheres and more and more companies will start to realise that they can be a great marketing tool and an excellent way to talk to their customers when utilised and updated properly.

4) Google will become more evil, Microsoft will become more evil. Google will get richer, Microsoft will get richer.

5) Content will continue to be king. With all the social networking being done, users need something to network.

6) More and more applications such as Google Docs (offering an online version of Microsoft Office’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint) will be going online and mobile, making them accessible from anywhere. Of course with that comes the inevitable privacy and security concerns.

7) On the actual design front I think we’ll see more fonts with serifs, more illustration enhanced design, rotating featured item/article done with javascript or flash, footers becoming more prominent in the overall site design and the death of titles, images and logos with a reflection.

8) This one is from twentysteps.com; Facebook and MySpace will merge and the new social application will be called MyFace. You will invite people to join by asking them to “Sit On MyFace”.

9) The internet is going through another bubble phase and while it won’t be as bad as the first one, something is going to give. Soon. You heard it here first. There are just too many privacy and security issues springing up and its starting to get out of control.

10) This is more of a hope than a forecast. That the overhyped SecondLife eventually dies.

11) Broadband issues in South Africa will get more and more coverage as businesses start to realise that they need to get their digital act together for 2010, which is now only 2 short years away. Whether those issues are able to get sorted in time is another story.

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