user 'personalisation'

Posted by: Qasim Virjee on Friday, 22 December 2006

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I was cruising through a post on mashable today about LiveVideo , a service to rival the biggies like youtube. Something caught my eye:

The most noticeable feature is the customization: not only do profile pages come with custom designs to match your personality, but videos also appear against unique backgrounds, making for a more immersive experience.

I've taken the liberty to underline the pertinent words/phrases. As a web producer who's constantly questioning the 'social networking' craze at the moment in order to make sites fostering sustainable communities, I really find this relationship between 'custom design' and 'personality'.... is that really why myspace, for eg, became soooo popular???

Do people older than, say, 30, even care about personalising web interfaces by customising the color schemes to suit their needs? I think this perspective is endemic of some movements right now associated with the tag '2.0' - reminds me of the portal craze of some years ago... LiveVideo does have some innovative features but I hope that people can maintain an old school view that the web is beautiful because it is a space with many places ; as these new content-heavy sites compete with each other to get snapped up by google or whatever I think this will become a big issue... then again, I prefer custom holidays to all-inclusives.