Flexible and Secure Applications
Unless you are willing to sacrifice a lot of time to make an application flexible AND secure, you will have to choose one or the other. In this example, I compare Myspace profiles and Facebook profiles.
Myspace offers very much flexibility for users on their personal profiles. Unfortunately, they chose to allow users to embed HTML code, which opened the door for countless security violations. They saved development time at the expense of security.
On the other hand, Facebook left users with fewer options for their profiles. Therefore, they insured security, but saved development time at the expense of flexibility.
Fast-forward a couple of years to Facebook’s release of their application platform. This time around, they sacrificed development time for a combination of flexibility and security.
June 21st, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Man you’re deep! Then, there’s no ’socializing net’ that can combine what MySpace and Facebook offer? Like, now? Perhaps in a future? (A close one, of course, let’s say, a year and a half or two years) Anyway, good luck on all that. See ya!
June 21st, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Actually, C represents security and flexibility. It just took a long time for Facebook to develop that platform. That’s why C doesn’t touch the blue ellipse — in order to launch the product quickly, they would have to sacrifice either flexibility or security.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:31 am
You could also argue about the initial targeted demographic for each platform. I remember when I was teaching how most of my students (high schoolers) were on Myspace.com but many of my colleagues (28+) were on Facebook. It seems that all of the funky bells and whistles appeal more to younger users who are all about “mod”-ding their page. Of course, Myspace’s popularity skyrocketed and that brought all sorts of corporate presence to the network. I notice a marked absence of this presence on Facebook. Just an observation.
Cheers!