[tutwabee]

"The response that I try to lob into these discussions, reduced to its crudest form, is: Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of one of the largest web sites on the planet, and his web site is beautiful, and it brings joy to a lot of people, so apparently being a good programmer isn’t what makes you design beautiful things that make people happy, in which case being a good programmer sounds like a fucking waste."

Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook. His coding abilities cannot be judged unless it is known how much of the Facebook code he actually wrote. I assume the majority of it was not written by him.

[noamsml]

Also, though Facebook is clearly a resounding success, I'm not sure I'd use the words "beautiful" and "makes people happy". More like "useful" and "makes people connected".

[rorymarinich]

It makes people happy. My mother has found old high school friends - old high school crushes, even - and met up with people who left her life a long time ago. A friend of mine in Washington D.C. uses it to organize all her groups of friends for her homecoming party. I used Facebook for writing my notes before I decided to make everything I wrote public, and I bonded with a lot of people over issues I'd never thought other people cared about. It's used for organizing protests and finding phone numbers and occasionally hooking up. Connections lead largely to happiness.

I think Facebook is one of the best-looking sites that's ever been, though the last two redesigns haven't been too tight. The original layout, with the links on the side and the two-column profile, was one of those things that vastly inspired me when I was younger. The level of order it forced on its users was stunning, especially compared to MySpace. Now it's been tuning down some of the things I liked - especially the "How do you know this person" syntax - but it's still more usable than any other site that huge. The fact that people can intuitively figure out how to post photos, videos, events, groups, notes, friend people, fan pages, add applications, all without any advice - my grandfather figured it all out without help - is one of those things that's so impressive that it's easy to ignore because you take it for granted. Meanwhile, a lot of the things that have become common in sites - the thing that stands out to me is the resizing textfields - were first popularly used in Facebook. When I wrote for AllFacebook my main interest was scouring the site, clicking everything I could, looking for those finesses. So it's beautiful in terms of dedication to usability if nothing else.

[Psyonic]

Facebook also causes anxiety. Now that older people are joining, its getting more complicated. My aunt just added me... I like my aunt, but do I really want her up-to-date on my day to day life? That said, I don't want to deny her... This is becoming a more pressing problem every day, as friends' parents add me, etc.

[rorymarinich]

I'd think the anxiety are outnumbered by the things that Facebook makes simpler. (I just add my relatives, and hope they don't mind that I occasionally use foul language. They usually don't.)