It's funny, these geocities sites were horrible but they provided a way for people to express themselves on the web.
MySpace tapped into this also , allowing people to change their page background, have autoplaying music etc.
The facebook/Twitter came along and spoiled it by prioritizing usability. Now basically everyone has an online presence that looks identical to the point of being sterile. Hell even 90% of wordpress sites look exactly the same.
I was at a SXSW panel discussion about user customizable interfaces a few years ago. Some of the panel participants said the expected things about UI difficulties and affordances and how amazed they were at the ingenuity of some of their customers who did things with their products they didn't even know were possible. An Apple guy was on the panel, and his take was different: "Apple has standards and a brand image to protect." He pulled up the black and red vampire-themed MySpace page of some chubby goth guy and proudly mocked him, saying, "Apple will never allow anyone to do this with any of our products." He spent a few moments scrolling through the page and pointing out the most embarrassing aspects of the design, really rubbing in what a tacky mess this poor guy made out of his MySpace page.
Who are the winners, the high-value brands? Apple and Facebook, who maintained control. Apple and Facebook can't stop their users from doing tacky things with their products (not yet, thank God) but they do make sure the carefully designed brand context is always visible and easily distinguishable from the user-generated content inside. Who are the losers, the low-value brands? MySpace and other companies who didn't maintain a strict distinction between their product and what users did with it.
Apple's being unintentionally ironic here. Their second attempt at an online service was eWorld, which was based around a modified AOL client talking to a modified AOL server. They took our client software, which looked like this:
You know, this is a really interesting point to make. I always loved Facebook because it cut back on the bullshit and emphasized data over everything. I wanted to use these services keep in touch with people, not to see them try and express themselves. But when you see too much data fly by it all starts to blur and look the same. It's easy to get cynical about people when all you see is the surface data they express about themselves – by default the least interesting things they could possibly share.
The legendary architect Christopher Alexander has a theory on how life flourishes: at its core is this idea that the world consists of overlapping "centers" – basically places where living things gather. Centers can overlap, so on Facebook your feed and your profile are each centers. By connecting centers, you encourage movement between them and a newer, greater center exists.
I feel that Facebook and Twitter are excellent at encouraging this movement between centers of data. But they're not good at making that data matter. MySpace and Geocities were awful at communication (remember MySpace bulletins?), but they were always about creating something unique for yourself, not about connecting you to anybody else.
Is there a way to do both at once? I'm not sure, but this is something I've been thinking about for a few years now. In high school I did some work for http://zoints.com, which was trying to create a network of connected forums to allow for both personal expression and information density, but their tool was way too cerebral for anybody else to catch on. The closest I think I've seen any site come to this is Tumblr, because it both allows for uniquely designed blogs and a central aggregator, but Tumblr is so bad at conversation that it makes holding lengthy conversations ugly and frustrating.
The theoretical solution to this would be to let users define their own centers: give them controls for looking at information in a unique way of their choosing. In a sense, this solution is the Internet, and things like email and RSS are how we connect disparate online entities, but those are very crude tools. The subtler interactions you allow for, the more you'll let people express themselves without getting in each others' ways – but it's hard to define just what these interactions ought to be.
Looking back I'd say the pinnacle (for me) was Facebook's Graffiti Wall app, back when apps were just starting to be a thing. People interacting through pictures and illustrations lent to much more creative back-and-forth than text ever did. But that wasn't ideal either. I love capturing and organizing information, but I agree with you that something's been lost. Reclaiming it without sacrificing the new will be an enormous challenge.
A small price to pay for good taste. After all we have to represent ourselves to future generations not to mention aliens that accidentally bump into our internet.
Rounded corners, drop shadows, subtle palettes with contrasting call to action buttons, several dozen social network sharing icons... Did I miss anything?
I urge everyone to click around that site a bit. It has everything: UFO conspiracy theories, 3d modeling, recipes, MS Paint drawings, horror stories, ...
Ah memories :) Does anyone remember the javascript meme where you'd get people to click a form button and then it would pretend to format your C:\ drive?? My 1996/7 site had that :D
Oh web rings!! And the format c:\ meme...what great memories!
Do you remember the "Through an incredible amount of programming, I wrote a script that will show you what time my VCR is set to"? meme? The user would click a link to a page that contained:
Well, mine had #0F0 for the background color and some copy/pasted javascripts (i.e. clock moving with the cursor). But yeah, pretty much the same style :) Must say that I did improve over the years.
This thread made me want to look for the website I made in 1996 as a 14 year old in the Wayback machine. Sadly, it was not available.
I did find my website made as a 16 year old. Unfortunately all of the images were missing. From what I remember, it was actually a pretty nice design. I think I'd still be proud of it if I had built it today.
I don't know that it takes anything special to make nytimes.com look like it's from yesteryear. The only thing it's missing really is some <blink> elements and that dancing baby.
Seriously though if they're going to stick with that column layout, they should look at how pinterest is presenting information.
MySpace tapped into this also , allowing people to change their page background, have autoplaying music etc.
The facebook/Twitter came along and spoiled it by prioritizing usability. Now basically everyone has an online presence that looks identical to the point of being sterile. Hell even 90% of wordpress sites look exactly the same.