A Grand Unified Theory of YouTube and MySpace

Ant writes "Paul Boutin's Slate article explains the factors contributing to the success YouTube and MySpace: they are easy to use (usability), and they don't 'tell you what to do.'" From the article: "Both YouTube and MySpace fit the textbook definition of Web 2.0, that hypothetical next-generation Internet where people contribute as easily as they consume. Even self-described late adopters like New York editor Kurt Andersen recognize that that by letting everyone contribute, these sites have reached a critical mass where 'a real network effect has kicked in.'"

Re:Web 3.0

[interiot]

And, for the subject of user-created quality, I recommend listening to this week's This Week in Tech podcast [twit.tv], where Kevin Rose talks about some of the inards of Digg, and how they have to do a lot of ongoing work to avoid letting Digg becoming a vehicle for spam, and that they implement an internal system of Karma. There are multiple parallels to both Slashdot's karma system, and Wikipedia's work that is done to prevent wikipedia from being used to promote spam, etc.

(which is relevant, because once you have other people deciding what is quality and what isn't, the spammers want to jump in, pretend to be anonymous, and say Hey! my adverts are quality stuff everyone should look at!)

Re:google pages?

[et764]

It will be interesting to see how Google Pages works out, since they are now also in the "everyone should be able to make a web page easily" camp. I was playing with it some last night. It didn't get along with my browser very well (Firefox on Linux). The site was incredible unresponsive. I'd type a couple sentences and then go off and IM for a couple of minutes as I watched the characters slowly appear one by one on the page. I don't suppose anyone else has found a way to fix this?

What's a cool thing about Google Pages that sets it apart from sites like MySpace is that it gives you a choice of lots of professionally designed themes. It still lets you edit raw HTML if you want, so I would assume you have a lot of customization possible, though I haven't used it enough to know. I wonder what they have done to keep people from making sites that look disgusting though. Maybe the themes are nice enough that people don't feel the need to make their site look gross. It seems like it could be just a matter of time before people start abusing the HTML feature and we start seeing things like there are on MySpace.

Google Pages does seem to remove some of the tags that are more likely to cause problems. It removes object tags, and script tags, which should at least keep people from playing twelve background songs at once.

Re:Tell people how to do it right...

[pile0nades]

This user style [userstyles.org] removes most crap on myspace.

Re:Tell people how to do it right...

[blackmonday]

I completely agree, so let me change your expeience on the site: greasemonkey. Go to userscripts.org and get the myspace scripts. No more ads, remove the custom CSS from profiles, remove the music, hell even add direct links to picture pages! (you know you go straight to the pics you perverts...)

Greasemonkey kicks all kinds of ass, plain and simple as that.