Technology As Innovator

What is your choice of media channel? Do you have dilemmas of choosing them?

Facebook

73.5 million users and growing fastest

What I like about it

1. Mini-Feed is useful in seeing a quick snapshot on the latest happenings within your network without going to several sites to check.
2. The ability to supply how you know a person.
3. Nice applications. Approximately 10% of Facebook applications I’ve tried are interesting and useful while others are not as good.

I think these can be improved

1. Fixed 600 width and non-resizable
2. Non-customizable design
3. No built-in blogging functionality. Blogging can be done with applications such as Live Blog, but we don’t normally depend on addons for such important values like blogs.
4. Tight security: profile only viewable by friends. How do you determine if a profile is your friend or not just by looking at the screen name which can be different from the real name?
5. One account can only join no more than 200 groups. Unlimited is preferred.

Orkut

24.6 million users

What I like about it

1. Simple design, Google philosophy after all
2. Extensible width
3. Ad-free

I think these can be improved

1. Name. Honestly speaking, the Turkish name “Orkut” is very unfamiliar. Just a remark, as the brand name is not supposed to change
2. Very few, if any, extensions

Yahoo! Mash

What I like about it

1. Wider width
2. Larger font
3. Allows profiles to be updated by friends
4. Mini-feed is also supplied

I think these can be improved

1. Check boxes to select friends to add should be provided
2. More group levels
3. Informal language. I am especially not easy with the word “fugly”
4. Profile with non-removable fields such as “What’s most likely playing on my iPod”… Excuse me, can I NOT have an iPod?

MySpace

107 million users. The currently largest site

What I like about it

1. Integrated all-in-one solution that includes social networking, blogging, mail, favorites, forum, movies, events, media

I think these can be improved

1. Inconsistent design
2. Music landing page
3. Spam, including spam invitations, protection
4. Tons of ads

Other notable networking sites

Read more

Wikipedia, List of social networking websites

Mashable, Facebook Hammers MySpace on Almost All Key Features

Techcrunch, Facebook platform

American Class Divisions

Nerdlifestyle, Media restrictions

My choice

Facebook to keep in touch with international friends and English-speaking communities

Yahoo! Mash. Many young Vietnamese users rely on Yahoo! services

for socially musical networking

How about you?

Share your experience here…

Which site do you like best? What you wish your site had offered?

Dear my readers,

I believe that by the time you came to my Lab, you had already read many other blogs.

Have you noticed that some blogs only display excerpts of their entries on the index page, and require you to click on “Read more…” to read the full post?

Tai Tran’s Lab saves you the additional clicks to reach full articles. Here, full entries are displayed so you don’t have to do the heavy job of clicking around for navigation.

However, if you click on a post’s title to go to the single page of the article, you will be able to:

1. View and add comments to the article
2. Have more options to add the article to social bookmarks sites, whereas only the most common options are available on the index page
3. Save the post as PDF file
4. Email the post to your friends
5. Print the post

The reason these options are not available on index page is because they will make it heavier for the page to load.

What do you think?

Please let me know your opinion of these services and where I should put these options so I can improve my site to match your needs. Furthermore, do you recommend any functionalities that are currently not supported here?

Thank you for going all along with me,

August 26, 2007

Tai Tran