We’re having a series of discussions at work under the title Love & Hate. Basically people bring in, or just talk about something they love and something they hate. It doesn’t have to be design, although most of it is, given the audience.

Anyway, I chose to talk about the differences between MySpace and Facebook. I said that I loved Facebook because of it’s structured nature and sound design, whereas I hated MySpace because of it’s counter-intuitive nature and the regularity with which users break their pages with unreadable text and horrific animations. I guess love and hate is a bit strong, but the difference between these two sites which basically do the same thing is stark.

Is the freedom that MySpace offers users to customise their profiles unwise? Does this mean users shouldn’t be trusted, or that Facebook unfairly constrains self expression? Does it really matter?

I’m reminded of the horrible ways in which people often customise their Windows PC environment, with custom colour schemes and backgrounds etc, probably involving Comic Sans. Users of Mac OSX don’t have the same options, they can’t change the system font for example, but the tightness of Apple’s GUI is a strong selling point because of it. I guess because I’m a graphic designer I want to enforce consistency on things like this, perhaps I need to go for a walk instead…

Then of course, Facebook is undeniably better built than MySpace. The geek in me can really see the difference, and Facebook’s support of 3rd party applications elevates it almost to the status of a platform in it’s own right.

So I’m safely in the Facebook camp, but then again, I’m not a 15 year old emo band member…