I sometimes wish there was more choice than the ubiquitous ‘like’ button on Facebook. At the time of writing, 398,844 people ‘like’ Marmite on Facebook. That sort of ambivalence shouldn’t be allowed. I thought it was a LOVE / HATE thing?

Idea for Marmite brand owners: start a campaign for Love and Hate buttons on Facebook.

Neil Buchanan is not dead.

The much loved children’s TV presenter is the subject of a false rumour which has gained momentum on Facebook, with a group entitled ‘RIP Neil Buchanan (the art attack guy)’ which at the time of writing this has 21,236 members. It seems it might all have started with a false Wikipedia entry claiming Neil had died last month. An obvious April Fool, what with the equally obvious cause of death being joked of as an Art Attack (sigh), but even so it, just goes to show how viral information is on the internet and how little rigour we often apply to what we read.

Wikipedia has long been dogged by cases of false information (sometimes intentionally, sometimes lazily) and there’s a long established history of false obituaries, but I imagine that the news was most shocking to Neil himself.

Of course, you can also be resurrected digitally, as Bob Monkhouse proved to great effect in aid of prostate cancer awareness:

Oh, and don’t forget to join the Neil Buchanan is ALIVE AND WELL Facebook group…

Due to popular demand (there are certainly enough Facebook groups), Cadburys have done the decent thing and brought back the Wispa.

I’d heard about this a while ago, but this lunchtime I actually found one in the shops. They’ve been sold out everywhere but I snapped one up and chomped away merrily with a cup of tea to hand. It looks suitably retro, can’t remember if it is exactly the same wrapper – I’m sure they have to put new legal stuff on it these days. Tasted just the same.

Apparently they’re going to advertise it with a gibbon playing the oboe on TV. Roy Wood is said to be readying a greatest hits LP.

Read the review and view the all important cross-section at (and I never thought I’d be posting this link) chocolatereview.co.uk

Now all I need to see is the return of the Wispa Gold…

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…