It occured to me about a year or so ago that Facebook is gradually taking over the web. Not only is it aiding revolutions and people are actually naming children after it, but small businesses are no longer as interested in developing their own sites, friends are posting  photos on Facebook - not Flickr and people are emailing me through Facebook rather than through email accounts on Gmail or Yahoo. If Facebook can replace email services and web sites, what is left before it can completely conquer the web? There are really only two things it needs to master.

Search

Google and Bing dominate searches today, but it shouldn’t be too difficult for Facebook to add that in. They are already incorporating Likes into Bing  adding what it is calling a “social layer” and Facebook updates have been searchable for years. Facebook already has the social layer down pat, getting the actual search results couldn’t be out of reach for them. Would you rather go to a site because it ranked high up in an algorythm or one that lots of your “friends” like?

eCommerce

The biggest drawback for a company wanting to represent themselves solely on Facebook is that they lose some interaction in terms of forms gathering data or in actually selling their products on Facebook. Facebook is improving the pages features today and more interactive integration can’t be far behind. They could always start small by acting more like an aggregator like Kayak, Shopzilla or BizRate.  Then friends can like those items (adding that “social layer” again) and drive traffic to Amazon or whatever site while getting credit for the click.

What Facebook has and what everyone wants is its audience and that audience gives it tons of valuable content –  absolutely free. Whenever I’m asked which site I think does the poorest job of design, I always say Facebook, and I still believe that. Finding information is difficult and aesthetically it is very bland, but this is a case of content being king. As long as my sister-in-law posts pictures of my newborn niece on Facebook instead of Flickr and as long as my oldest friend keeps sending me email through Facebook, they’ve got me. I might as well buy some shoes on there as well.

Nothing exemplifies the speed of Internet retribution faster than what happened on February 3 of this week with Kenneth Cole. 

His tweet that started it all:

As terrible as it is and how disturbing that he thought it would humorous, you only have to look at the other ads he has done after other tragedies. One of the more publicized was one that read, “GOD DRESS AMERICA” shortly after 9/11. Of course that was before Twitter. 

Hours after this tweet an apology came via Twitter and Facebook, but the most interesting thing that happened was  @kennethcolePR and #KennethColeTweets sprang up. This happened within hours of Cole’s original tweet. @kennethcolePR had over 6,000 followers by the end of the day and hundreds of people came up with their own parodies with the hashtag KennethColeTweets and thousands more retweeting everything.  A Google search shows over 600 news articles written about the debacle. All of this in less than 24 hours.

Today, it looks like KennethColePR is coming down with an offer:

So, what does this all mean? I can’t say and I’m certainly not a “social media guru”, but it does make me more in awe of the Internet than ever. It is truly this magical thing that can spawn a revolution, it can help you find an old friend, it can teach you just about anything from how to make macarons to how fix a carburetor and it can do all of that in less than a day.

OmniGraffle on iPad

How Design recently posted a list of apps made for designers, Top 10 iOS Apps for Designers . The one I was the most interested in was the OmniGraffle app for the iPad which would allow you to create wireframes and flow charts on the go and then transfer them over to your computer later. Now, this really wouldn’t work for me personally because I don’t own an iPad or a Mac or use one at work so I’ll keep bringing my laptop with me everywhere.

The other one I like (and has a great title) is What the Font which allows you to snap pictures of a font you’re not sure about and the app will identify it for you. It is the Shazam for fonts.

Luke Wroblewski recently tweeted “Does user-centered design work? MSFT interviewed 50k people over three years, and the product (the Kin) lasted less than 60 days.” There were responses by a few saying that Microsoft clearly didn’t listen or asked the wrong questions, but my first thought was 50,000 people were interviewed?!  A little later I read an article entitled, “How Microsoft Crowdsourced the Making of Office 2010” it says that Microsoft received 2 million comments on its beta version of Office and an additional 600 people participated in a study in a Virtual Research Lab. Do they numbers seem excessive to anyone else?

Jakob Nielsen says, “Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.”  Granted, Microsoft has a lot of different types of users (though the Kin was designed specifically for younger, social networking savvy people), but my mind simply can’t get around the numbers here. Who could coordinate all of that? Who read all of the results? Wasn’t there some repetition somewhere? How many personas do they have? How long did it take? Doesn’t the 80/20 rule come into play somewhere? And how much did it cost?  The red flags must have come up at some point and they were disregarded.

I’m stuck in middle America and I can’t say anything about the politics that goes down in Seattle and San Francisco, but I certainly hope that the Kin doesn’t damage the reputation of user centered design. It is a sobering fact that while the Kin limped to a quick death with the feedback of 50,000 people, the iPhone 4 has soared on the feedback of likely only Steve Jobs. When an accepted solution to an obvious iPhone 4 design flaw is to “Just avoid holding it in that way” it makes it harder to be a user centered advocate in the corporate world. I really hope that Office 2010 kicks some serious butt not only for Microsoft, but for our cause as well.

I’m loving the whole Xbox 360 Netflix streaming. It is so nice to search through and say, “Hey, I’ve never seen Footloose before. I’ve got an hour or so free. Let’s watch it!” The ability to have more control over what you can watch and the fact you can see/hear it immediately is wonderful for the least patient amongst us (I’m definitely included). No more going to Blockbuster on a rainy cold night in your pj’s with an overcoat to hide what you’re wearing. No more empty boxes or late fees. Also for music lovers, no more going to the store and trying to find what you are looking for and humming something to a store clerk in the hopes he will recognize the tune and point you in the right direction. No, that is what Shazam is for. Humming won’t work, but if you can pull out your phone and tag the song before it is over, you are set.

It makes me wonder what other things will soon be coming to an iPhone or XBox near me.

My only real complaint? Come on Netflix, get a better search feature on the XBox. I end up having to get my laptop out or my iPhone to add things to my Instant Queue. What shows up as the default results are so limited and there is no way to enter any search criteria. I know it can be a pain to type with a controller (unless you have a keyboard attachment), but it is a bigger pain to go to the Web site when you’re ready to watch something. You’ve got me hooked on immediacy – don’t let me down now!