hyalineskies

When Facebook released a new news feed interface, the userbase revolted. After tons of media attention, multiple user protests, and two days’ worth of furious coding by Facebook’s developers, Zuckerberg apologises. Should Zuckerberg have to apologise for building a better interface? Regardless of the hit Facebook takes because of this, Facebook has taught all of us in social media design a new rule of the game: there is actually a threshold where social users feel uneasy about the ease of information access, and it’s closer than we would have guessed.

Viral marketing is the big deal in the advertising world as of late, and it’s being misused constantly. It’s time for us to stop buying our own hype and examine what makes things viral to begin with.

With the whole explosion of alternate reality games and viral marketing, what hasn’t stopped people from hijacking real stories and exploiting them for commercial gain? It’s a threat to the integrity of information everywhere, and one of the deepest downfalls to a society that revolves around the reputability of user-created content.

Just because enterprise clients could easily buy us along with everything we own almost instantly doesn’t mean that we should bow down to their every design decision. It’s easy to take direction into your own hands at the point where educating the client stops and compromise begins.

“Flash memory maker SanDisk, however, has seemingly collected the wool from other vendors for use in its latest interactive marketing campaign, a counterculture, iPod-bashing scheme called iDon’t, which quite literally refers to iPod owners as mindless, consumer-whore sheep. It’s certainly a frontal assault, but iDon’t believe that SanDisk (or SanDisk’s marketing executives) really thought this out before starting one of the worst ad campaigns I’ve seen since the dot-com era.”

When SanDisk builds an entire marketing scheme around a countercultural revolution to overthrow iPod, somebody somewhere forgot that Apple was on top of counterculture years ago. It’s a fatal exercise in naïvely thinking different, and I’m ruthless in tearing it apart.