A Commonplace Book

But it’s not a mixtape, it’s a Muxtape: No Parents!

As with most people I’ve talked to, my attraction to Muxtape, the new streaming audio phenom, is definitely grounded in its simplicity. With his initial Tumbler post announcing the service’s launch, creator Justin said “expect rapid developments,” but I’m hoping they don’t come too rapidly.

It might not advance their business model (is there one?) to take it slowly but the lack of features on Muxtape is what makes it so exciting. No friend lists, no search function, and no bloody profile to fill out. You can’t have more than one mixtape per account. It’s beautiful.

The move in this direction is a pleasant broader shift on the part of designers. Even Yahoo, usually a punchline to an untold joke about overcomplicated interfaces, just backed Flickr’s launch of video hosting that restricts length to 90 seconds. No full episodes of Family Guy there, the goal seems to be for people to upload, literally, moving pictures.

Whether either of these sites will remain in their uncluttered state for long is a mystery. Both could very well begin deploying “improvements” as soon as their basic architecture seems stable enough. I’m sure doing so will improve their bounce rate and their site-visit times and other monetizable stats, but for the sake of good design I hope they remain as they are.

I’ve been putting my rudimentary CSS and HTML skills to the test by modding my latest Wordpress theme, Grid Focus, and I’ve been pretty happy with the results so far. It is by all accounts still an overwhelmingly depressing mass of gray, however, so I’m testing different color palettes to see what works.

Since it is difficult to test color palettes when even the pictures in the most recent post are grayscale, I am making this useless test post solely for the purpose of including the absurdly super-saturated color picture above.

Slate Magazine put up an article today, titled “The Death of E-Mail,” which argues two points about the death of email. First, email is falling out of favor as users switch to social-networking sites (SNSs). Second, email should be falling out of use because it is a relic of a different age.

I’m skeptical about the first half of this article, but its a bit tough to argue without going deeply into the statistics and methodologies used, and I’m not so inclined to spend my evening analyzing relative level of use. I will, however, concede to the increasing importance of Twitter, Facebook, and Pownce (even if just in conjunction with email, which you still need to sign up for any such site.)

The second half of Chad Lorenz’s thesis, meanwhile, is something I am willing to take issue with, and I was surprised to see Thomas Hawk write in favor of it. I certainly think email can be and is routinely abused; just look here for a library of examples. But that doesn’t mean the situation will be solved by switching to Facebook messaging and Twittering.

In fact, I think its fairly well established that most early adopters of these services are starting to suffer from “log-in fatigue.” Using the same username/password for different sites might just be asking to be hacked, but maintaining a different combination of the two across the wide variety of such sites is practically ludicrous.

So the solution, as Facebook and Google have realized, is to go beyond being either a site or a portal. The holy grail now is to become a platform. And after a grand battle for technology market supremacy (a la VHS and Beta), we will all use one of these services. Then, despite a change in underlying technology, we will be back to a monolithic user interface and we will once again be receiving the same emails about how Bill Gates just wants to give us money.

I could punch up a numbered list of all the reasons I think its a bad idea to switch from email to using a variety of activity specific SNSs, but then I’d just be replicating all of the work done by Scott Beale here. (Note: if I lived in San Fransisco it’d be interesting to set up Beale and Hawk in a photographer vs. photographer battle to the death over whether email is good or evil.)

To paraphrase and add to Beale’s thoughts: SNSs are great for passively sharing information about yourself and your activities, but there will still always be a very real need for people to actively contact their friends and coworkers. In these situations, the phone is useful for day to day contact, but in situations where you need to coordinate the thoughts of a group of people about a specific project over an extended period of time, Facebook will not be replacing email any time soon if ever.