Design & Social Media
Almost everybody I know in my college owns and operates their own Facebook profile pages with the means of staying connected. The website has become so prevalent that the general population outside of college has started using it. I remember Facebook back in its prime, when one had to have a college email address to register. Back when it looked like this:
It’s hard to imagine that only four years have passed since the Facebook homepage has gone through so many evolutions to get to where it is now:
As a social medium, Facebook has become a sort of virtual country with countless residents taking advantage of all the online goods and services that it offers. This includes the overall design of the page. Back when the company has started streamlining the look of the homepage and creating major changes, millions of users created protest pages demanding the return of the “old Facebook” (a move that in my opinion is both useless and idiotic since people created the pages within Facebook’s social framework making it a protest that still supports the use of the site).
But Facebook listened. The developers created a page in which users can view the next layout change and send feedback to what works and what doesn’t. As citizens of its virtual country, Facebook even gave users the power to have a say in the privacy policies of the website.
Which brings me to my point: design in social media has already started evolving into some form of neo-communism in which the citizens have power over the future well-being of the virtual country. It only makes sense to do so since many users expect to have control over their own spaces online so much so that protest pages are vehemently created against simple design changes.
Will this be an evolution leading to good design? Only time will tell.
