As usual, my first comment explains the title, I found this image to use on the page and wanted to make it relevant, ah well.

Could’ve been worse – I could’ve said ‘Facebook – at a shot’.

Now unless you’re socially inept or have parents who don’t like you using social networking sites (which given recent news I’m not going to comment on), you may’ve noticed some major changes to the workings and look of the world’s current favourite website, call me quick to write them off but I’m sensing another mass exodus from the directory of faces to the next up and coming network on the scale that we’ve seen with MySpace and Bebo in the past.

Ignoring the mainly adult-targeted site ‘Friends Reunited’ and the slightly pre-dating website Friendster (the latter being ignore because I was too young to remember it and I’m too lazy to research it), it’s fair to say that MySpace was the major social network that introduced my generation to the idea of an Argos Catalogue of people, invariably allowing you to learn a wealth of information on someone you may not have even met yet, most of which orchestrated to promote yourself while you save all your weird, unusual or else creepy aspects of your personality to yourself.

MySpace was a revolution in that it allowed proper personalisation of a page, appealing to the web designer in all of us (of course, some of us actually designed our own websites, having said that I did only a bit of coding of this site, cheers Louis), was well placed in time to be able to provide people posting full songs to their profile above copyright, for a bit, and the first iteration of the ‘status’ update and moods. Eventually, MySpace broke past the barrier of the Star-Trek discussing nerd fan base and actually became cool, with practically every band in the universe (both rock stars and unsigned) creating a MySpace page, an easy platform to showcase your tunes. A fair few bands of infamy today started by putting their music on MySpace and being talent scouted there, such as Elliot Minor, My Chemical Romance and Panic! at the Disco (I’ll let you fill in your own MySpace-Emo joke here).

It’s fair to say that the heavy emphasis on new musicians that MySpace put on during the height of it’s popularity has saved it now. It remains a great platform for all kinds of music, but when was the last time you heard anyone ask if you have a MySpace page? Eventually uncovering my old MySpace page (the password long forgotten and the e-mail address no longer mine), was a huge nostalgia tour, as the interface seems to have changed very little, if at all, I will talk more on that later.

Alas, the days of MySpace are all but over and us fickle teenagers quickly hopped to the next social network site, doodle circles and draw a lower case ‘b’ in your maths textbook my friends, for Bebo.

Bebo was much the same as MySpace in that it had almost the exact same features, except it was just a bit new. Starting off as the cool people’s social network, simply because everyone was on MySpace at the time, people eager to prove their street cred (simply by my terminology you can tell I was never amongst the popular people) abandoned (or later deleted) theirSpace and started rebuilding their piece of the youth catalogue from scratch. My fond recalls of Bebo, which I must’ve been using up to 2008 so hardly a stretch of the memory, are mostly ones of arguments and paranoid worrying over how far up someone’s ‘Top 16’ list I was and how much ‘Love’ I had received/given in the day. One of my favourite features of Bebo was the level of personalisation above and beyond the realm of MySpace. Whilst the former champion of the interwebs left customisation to other people, with separate websites distributing the coding needed to customise your page, hardly unique, or else code it yourself, tricky for most, Bebo allowed you to put together a skin in site and easily.

The process of designing a Bebo skin was simply a case of creating images of certain dimensions and uploading them to the relevant fields as well as allowing minor tweaks in font colours. Though very simple, the very idea was enough to put off a lot of people and I clearly remember designing and creating skins for people, I was a sad little boy. However, looking at my old Bebo page is a snapshot of how I was circa late 2007 and, though it is evidently different, again it’s still relatively similar.

Once again, Bebo, as with MySpace, began to decrease in popularity and, though it is still very much alive and not so much kicking as visibly twitching, it remains (unlike MySpace) a haven for spammers trying to squeeze the last out of Bebo. We quickly learned to love another social network, the current champion, Facebook.

Once again, the lure of Facebook convinced us to rebuild how the digital world saw us from scratch. I won’t go into much detail on Facebook because you probably already know it, but I always find it peculiar that a social network with no major page customisation tools has become so popular. My thoughts are that the ability to keep up to date in real-time, albeit a relatively recent feature, has saved all the tedium of refreshing that was necessary on it’s predecessors as well as it’s general speediness from dynamic pages makes it a generally happier experience for the user.

Facebook has been renowned for significant changes in usability and aesthetics, but possibly for the wrong reasons. As soon as even the most minor visible change occurs on Facebook, you can bet your belt-buckle that 80% of Facebook statuses reference how much they hate the new features, yet it’s popularity continues to grow. Generally, I’ve been open to the changes, actually quite enjoying them, and I’ve been anything but a doomsayer, until now.

Major changes have appeared recently on Facebook that overturn entirely how the website works, it’s new features are far from intuitive and bringing in multiple feeds makes it a confusing experience trying to work out which is which, with no clear distinction between what, for example, Live Feed and News Feed are supposed to show. It’s also been noticeably slower and e-mails notifying a comment or other such information has been coming in much later and often in the wrong order. History has shown us that when it comes to social networks people are fickle, and Facebook has tried to stay fresh by frequent changes and updates to how it works, but in their struggle to do so they appear to have run out of ideas and not had a proper look at how it affects their site overall. In the bid to keep up with the young people that outran Bebo and MySpace, has Facebook encountered an update too far?

And now, as we must, we look to the future. What’s next for the the modern student’s fight to create a positive advert of the self?

Twitter? No, hell no. Twitter is good but remember that it’s just 140 character status updates and little else, there would have to be a new source of revenue and a huge overhaul before Twitter is on par with Facebook. Spotify? Their music service has plans to implement a social network into their software and programs, but all centred on the free music streaming that makes Spotify what it is, which puts it the same track that MySpace had. In all honesty I don’t know of any new social network that is radically different from the old ones, at least not enough to persuade people to switch, maybe Google will come up with something in the near future.

So maybe, if Facebook refuse to reverse their poor choice of changes, people will stick with them simply because of no real alternative or better site to use. But, as ever, something will appear and Facebook better hope they can keep up.

But just in case I’m wrong, do some revision -

Mat