Great article by Paul Scrivens that shares, what I feel, is the secret to MySpace’s success:

MySpace
is a community site that allows you to setup a profile and blog and
connect with friends and strangers. It’s also a designer’s and lover of design’s worst nightmare because the UI of the site is atrocious yet it boasts 17 million visitors a month (and rising) and was recently purchased for over $580 million by News Corp.

…The community is what makes MySpace. If you ask someone why they are on MySpace 9 times out of 10 you will get this reply: That’s where all my friends are.

…This is the same reason why people usually only use Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger or AIM (yes I know there are apps that allow the usage of all 3 at once). If you get the community then you win the game

…I would suggest you read Malcolm Gladwell’s classic The Tipping Point for a better understanding of how events reach critical mass. In any case you have to reach the so-called Connectors in the community. Blinksale did this perfectly. If you don’t know who the Connectors are then you don’t know your audience.

…. Trying to navigate the MySpace UI is frustrating at best. So why does it work? Besides the community I think it’s the fact that you can customize your pages and if you explore the community you will see some crazy designs going on. 90% of them you can’t even read the content, but people love it.

…the design sucks them in. In a way it also causes a bit of lock-in. Once you learn the interface that is time invested that you don’t want to lose. That’s why many people will never leave MovableType because they understand how it works inside and out.

…It empowers people to get their message out and make connections (emphasis mine – Karl). That’s the only way I can put it. Same reason why Xanga, FaceBook and LiveJournal are crazy popular. Get a community together where people can communicate easily and you have yourself a winner. Ask Amazon.

Besides all of that, the site sucks and I never use it, but I know that doesn’t matter much when I can enter a club and the first question out of a woman’s mouth is: Are you on MySpace?

Check out the rest of this great piece. Paul is looking for feedback. I think he’s on to something.

Google Talk is out (review at DownloadSquad) and while it doesn’t do all that much to convince users to switch from Yahoo! or AIM, under the covers it is radical for how it works – using an open protocol. XMPP is a messaging/presence protocol that has been around for a long, long time (work was announced way back in January 1999) and has recently been ratified as a standard by the IETF (I think just last year). During that time, numerous instant messaging systems have come along that utilize the protocol, for example Gaim and Gush. The Jabber Software Foundation, has been the main organization that has educated developers as to what it is and be used for, has been an avenue for extensions to be built for it, has promoted it as an alternative to the closed solutions that big three have been promoting, and has helped it thru the standardization process. Yahoo! employee Russell Beattie had this to say about the protocol this morning:

You don’t send individual XML documents per message, instead you open up a socket and start writing one XML document keeping the socket open the entire time, as you need to send more messages, you keep adding XML stanzas to the document. You do this both on the up and down stream. To end the conversation, you simply end your document’s root tag. Now think about this – if you’re really just sending a never-ending XML document as the way to make a conversation, then extending this protocol is drop-dead simple. You just add another namespace and include new tags for that namespace in the document. *Poof* – extensible instant messaging and presence. They’ve got a ton of extension proposals already in the works, including sending forms, multi-user chat, and geolocation. I mean, it’s very cool.

I’m not sure how scalable XMPP is, or why Yahoo! hasn’t switched to it yet, but I’d love to see us put an XMPP gateway at Y! and start letting people access Yahoo! IM via Jabber as well as via our custom client. Our IM client is amazing (with integrated Music, Search, Webcam and Voice), but choice is always better – and then ISVs could start piggybacking on our stuff as well. You still need a Yahoo! ID, so it’s still a win for us… I’m not sure where the decision is kept, but it’d be neat if this turn of events prompted us and MSN and AOL to open up a bit.

Dave Winer has experimented with XMPP in the past and was happy to hear the news.

A while back I read a great book from O’Reilly – (looks like it needs an update) – “Programming Jabber” – that made it trivial to roll your own instant messenger.

Google made a smart choice.

An indepth comparison of Django and Rails frameworks at magpiebrain is a good read and one later for reference.

Details at Neowin and voice capability speculation at Om Malik’s. He theorizes that Skype is in trouble. More in a related NYTimes article, Where Does Google Plan to Spend $4 Billion?.

BTW, while Google Desktop has to be one of the most creepy apps I have ever witnessed (privacy invading potential), I’m going to use it at work. The combined gmail + outlook email preview is worth it alone.

Can it be done? Will you get fired? How do you avoid getting fired? An article published in the Inquirer features “Philly’s most influential blogger”, and Philly Future team volunteer, Scott McNulty and the experience he has had working at he University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School while writing the terrific Blankbaby. Check out what he has to say here.

We’d all rather be Blankbabied then Dooced.