For the past few days, Mike and I have been spending a lot of time arguing about discussing themes. We’ve been trying to figure out the extent of user control over themes and the publishing platform in general. Our goal is to balance desire for personal expression with some sort of coherent user interface and structure. This is not an easy task and successful social publishing/networking sites have reached differing conclusions. There is a perception (clearly rooted in reality) that MySpace is a chaotic, free-for-all mess, while Facebook is spartan and useful. As Andrew Chen notes, this may reflect different design and user-experience goals. MySpace wants creatives who aim to publish, while Facebook wants a more general audience that aims to communicate. To an extent, this is true. But, I think the MySpace/Facebook divide may be overstated (sharing photos, listing interests and hobbies, etc. on Facebook is still personal expression) and that both sites are recalibrating their approaches in ways that make them more like each other and seem to suggest to future site builders a middle ground.

In recent months, MySpace updated their dashboard (making it more like Facebook’s) and released a profile editor tool that both simplifies the profile design process and implicitly imposes certain constraints (MySpace users can still paste in layouts).

What is MySpace aiming for?

1. More consistent content discovery (if I can’t find your photos, I definitely won’t look at them)
2. More uniform navigation (because of crazy CSS, the MySpace nav is often lost)
3. A simpler publishing platform

(essentially, be more like Facebook)

What hasn’t MySpace sacrificed?

1. The ability to color, layout, and style your MySpace in innumerable ways
2. The ability to bring in widgets from outside (Slide, RockYou)
3. The ability to go crazy if you want

Meanwhile, the profusion of Facebook apps has, by extension, eliminated the uniformity of Facebook profiles. Finding content on Facebook profiles is still easier than on most MySpace pages, but it is a far trickier task than content discovery was in Facebook’s salad days. Thousands of apps give Facebook users the ability to shape and differentiate their pages from their friends in ways similar to MySpace users.

What is Facebook aiming for?

1. To give users more powerful tools for personal expression
2. To allow 3rd-party widgets to do just that
3. To give users ownership over the pages in a way they previously lacked (when they were all uniform) via 1 and 2

(essentially, be more like MySpace)

What hasn’t Facebook sacrificed?

1. A consistent top-level navigation structure
2. A general outline of where content goes on the profile page
3. A consistent branding scheme throughout the site

At the end of the day, MySpace is still more open, more chaotic, and a more expressive platform than Facebook, while the latter remains more successfully utilitarian. Yet, the lines have certainly been blurred and the platforms have moved closer along the personal expression spectrum. Where they ended up is instructive:

1. Keep your top-level navigation clean

2. Set guidelines so (in most instances) users can find the content they are looking for on profile pages

3. Enable 3rd-party bling-bling

4. Make sure there is a sense of ownership (MySpace still does this a lot better than Facebook)

5. Maintain brand identity (Facebook still does this a lot better than MySpace)