[taiki]

if ICQ was so wonderful to use then why did we flee to the next best thing to come along? My feeling was that ICQ sucked in a very horrible way.

I was never around for the Friendster days(I was a Livejoural user through and through, damn it), however the reason I suspect MySpace lost out is that they did do the GeoCities thing. Everytime I see people complaining about a new Facebook layout, I always think, "Is this worse than the best MySpace page?" Answer is always no.

It's not that we're reinventing ICQ or AIM or MySpace or whatever, it's that we're refining the, oh god I hate using this word, "experience" of using it.

Does Facebook have random flash things pegging my CPU to render a cube in 3D with my friend's vacation photos on each face? Does Facebook have auto-playing music? Does Facebook have the option of setting the page's colors to be hideously garish?

I also think Facebook is realizing this, and they're trying to retool their business away from Facebook this website you visit, to Facebook a thing where all of these neat services are wired up to. I don't know if they'll succeed, but at least they have the sense to know they're not going to be on top forever.

[funkyy]

MySpace lost because it lost war to spam. Majority of regular users were just fed up with freaking spam. Tens of comments, invites, messages mass sent from some unknown wannabes. Facebook offered more closed approach - focusing on real life friends and trying to tackle the spam. Remember having 500 friends on MySpace? How many of them have you EVER seen in real life? 10-20% ?

[visakanv]

It was also getting really tedious and laggy, and there were lots of fake profiles. I used both MySpace (I played in a band) and Facebook in 2007, for seemingly different reasons and different groups of friends... but eventually everyone moved to Facebook and MySpace got really vacant.

[saraid216]

> and there were lots of fake profiles

FYI, this is a feature, not a bug. One of MySpace's early differentiators was that it allowed fake profiles, unlike Friendster.

Another differentiator was the extreme level of customization available, which as you note, resulted in a lot of lag because most people do not even realize that could be an issue.

[jquery]

> Does Facebook have random flash things pegging my CPU to render a cube in 3D with my friend's vacation photos on each face? Does Facebook have auto-playing music? Does Facebook have the option of setting the page's colors to be hideously garish?

No, Facebook has successfully homogenized the identity of individuals. Every person's page is the exact same professional-looking franchise restaurant. BORING. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if people could make their pages individualized in a thoughtful way. Few people are asking them to allow Flash or go full MySpace. Perhaps instead, a library of curated themes, or even fully custom CSS (that could be turned off), a la subreddits.

[taiki]

I don't want my system to crawl or my eyes to burn because someone decided that yellow on white or white on yellow or yellow on magenta was a good idea or that having a song from 2006 auto play whenever i browsed to someone's page was a good idea or...

If you want all of that, build yourself a home page. Tumblr and Livejournal did it right by offering ways to view someone's account with out their idea of what good taste is. Still, between NO customization and customization, I'll take the bland option.

It works great on Reddit for subreddits because if you get it wrong, you can just move to another subreddit or find a moderator who knows a thing or two about CSS.

I can't just up and find friends who aren't fucking colorblind.

[forgottenpass]

ICQ was so wonderful to use then why did we flee to the next best thing to come along?

For the same reason we joined ICQ in the first place. Hype, incremental improvement, playing with new toys, and some of our friends were there but not on the previous thing we used.

ICQ did suck. It sucked the way most things suck: given the environment and state of the product at the time of release, they sucked less than other things on at least one metric.

[themusicgod1]

I'm getting reports from multiple contacts that Facebook is putting autoplaying music videos in strategic places. Very myspace-ish.