The Metanerd

Has anyone else noticed how convoluted Facebook has become? A friend and I were trying to figure out how to make her tagged pictures accessible again. After half an hour of clicking on every button imaginable, it turns out that you have to change the settings for every single picture.

Facebook isn’t the first to do this to us. Think of all the new layouts of Twitter that we’ve been seeing recently. Think way back in the day with Myspace. If you dare, think even further back to Xanga. All the increases in features had a adverse effect and caused users to find the next big thing.

Despite Tumblr’s similarity to Xanga (admit it, your first ‘blog’ was either on Xanga or LiveJournal), I love that Tumblr hasn’t changed much in its core functionality as a blogging platform. Sure, the community is more visual than WordPress, but the way we post hasn’t changed much.

New isn’t always good. If something isn’t broken, don’t fix it. I think we need to slow down and take those idioms to heart more. Keep things simple and be easy.