I’m not a MySpace whore, but….. Legit Flash Layouts
Just like the phrase “I don’t mean to be a bitch, but…” you know the proceeding remarks will be chastising, harsh, self-serving and sometimes largely irrelevant despite this weak, weak, disclaimer… Now, I’m really not a myspace whore, infact, the only time I log in is to help friends with design/layout customization issues or to check in with people who refuse to get facebook…but…
First, let’s figure out, how I got here-
Retracing my steps
My chain: All set off by my trial copy of OmniFocus (I downloaded because Merlin Mann mentions that it’s what he uses) which opens with a link to David Allen‘s website as well as 43folders (Merlin Mann) which had a fresh post of links in the list Mail Trends caught my eye which lead me to persistent.info – directly under that link lurked Hivelogic’s post about Offices and The Creativity Zone… this is when it really exploded- from there I clicked on the referenced material to find out what coworking was and read Jason Calacanis’ article of tips for start ups. Then, in the ps from his article I saw Peter Rojas of RCRDLBL’s advice – recognizing RCRDLBL (I love that site) I wanted to find out more about Peter Rojas (whom I didn’t realize was one of the main guys behind Engadget) – Clicking his name lead me to a mahalo.com thread on him. from there, out of curiosity of what a successful full time webloggers myspace would look like, clicked link #6 – MySpace: Peter Rojas Profile – there I saw a very impressive myspace profile that I immediately started to reverse engineer. Ten minutes later I realized I was looking too hard when I spotted the “MySpace Layouts – <3MyFlash” Badge“. I clicked that and then poof, I was there. Although there was A LOT of dead end branches and other diversions along the way, that was basically my direct, social, semantic and actual path to this site… now why can’t someone invent a tracker that does that- I haven’t used Me.dium to tell you how close it comes, but from my limited exposure to it- I think it can track progress like that….
But I digress.
The site is impressive. The have well designed, appealing, functional Flash MySpace designs that are A) Easy to set up and take basically two steps. B) Free C) Their link through badge is fairly unobtrusive and inconspicuous. They even have a design that incorporates your Flickr account in a really useful way. They were nice enough and it was hassle free enough that I even took 2 minutes (literally) to put one of their layouts to use (the Dark styled Flickr one) on my page. (For explanation of my url, just Google imagelink NSFW search “Adam Dexter” with the quotes- however beware, the results will certainly be NSFW.
But to recap- I’m not a MySpace whore, I don’t really use MySpace- However, I do appreciate good design as well as cool free and innovative web apps/sites. So you should check these guys out and show them a little love.
This interesting process lends itself to somewhat of a discussion. I can’t be the only person with completely legitimate yet totally unrelated web chains that cause discovery. I mean, that’s partly the thought behind StumbleUpon. But there has to be something further behind why and how we get to where we are on the web. Google Trends is starting to pick up on the organic search part of the process, but is there a way to put in place sets of references/referrers that would let the surfer be anonymous yet track the users path, not just within a window, but as I and others do, through tabbed windows and cut and paste links as some terms aren’t always hyper-linked.
This app would most likely have to be browser or even OS based as it would have to track the clipboard and new windows/tabs. But if this was created, think of the type of data you would get. It would open up a whole new world to PPC ads, link placement and collaboration. You could expose the trends of users on the most honest, personal level.
It’s also very possible something exactly like this already exists… if so, please let me know.
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