Here here! Jason has an excellent post about Facebook as the new AOL.

Its a comparison that people don't want to admit to being accurate, because AOL is everything that is considered unfashionable amongst the web's key influencers, whilst Facebook is quite the thing.

I must admit this short lived enthusiasm mirrors my own feelings. A couple of months ago I was breathless about it, largely because of its minimalist design. And now I find it pretty amateur and useless, despite its slick appearance.

In short, there is something about Facebook that doesn't feel like its a step forward in the development of the web.

Facebook is the new AOL (kottke.org)

Denton gave me some feedback from the Gizmodo editors about the iPhone:

'Two thumb typing nearly impossible'. - Ouch

Some waiting on iPhone improvements before buying | Reuters.com

airports of the world - united!

Almost as many people are going gaga about Facebook these days, as the iPhone and the knee-jerk reaction seems to be to focus the discussion on the ui design, since it is so conspicuously different from Myspace.

Myspace is a 'fugly' mess, when Myspace was hip amongst the geeks, then fugly was hip. Successful things on the web, it was argued, are about customization and flexibility. The sticker-book-full-of-crap style of Myspace would do better than the stifling control enforced by some graphic design Nazi.

Facebook is different, it really is well designed, and now I'm hearing some of the same people who debated the virtues of fuglyness promote facebook.

Interestingly, not many people have picked up on the fact that Facebook is as different from what has become the web 2.0 style, as the Myspace style. Web 2.0 sites tend to use a lot of extraneous CSS and HTML to create round boxes and three dimensional shadow effects with high reflection. This style apes the third generation 'aqua' Apple OS.

Browsers inherently work with flat shaded square box model and so does Facebook. In doing so it creates a satisfyingly minimalist look, effortlessly that makes many web 2.0 sites look like they are designed by coders who are trying to hard, rather than designers.

Even if the focus of the design talk may be wrong not to differentiate Facebook with web 2.0 style rather than Myspace, I suspect the real issue is the type of design that people rarely talk about.

The Facebook difference is about software design rather than graphic (or even UI) design, and these things are very different.

And the key piece of software design that makes Facebook work, in my opinion, is its full on embrace of the blog style 'reverse chronological list'. If one were to pick one of the central design components of the web it would be this, the thing that made single person online diaries become the publishing model for global media organizations online.

Facebook takes a list of friends and creates a personal newspaper spliced together from the actions of people in your network. It goes beyond the early experiments in social networking which started with bare bones links to people, followed by blog like profiles (but for the 99.999% of people who don't really want or need a blog).

Just as blogging creates a paradigm for collecting your thoughts and pushing them out there in front of the world, Facebook creates a paradigm for collecting everyone else's thoughts and putting them in front of you. And by doing that it is very well designed in the non superficial sense.

NYTimes

"If there is a billion-dollar gamble underlying Apple's iPhone, it lies in what this smart cellphone does not have: a mechanical keyboard."

This pretty much sums it up. Apples nailed the perfect form factor with the iPod (a cigarette packet rather than the disastrous Newton brick).

However, things have moved on since, in the world of smartphones and the Blackberry style keyboard beneath screen is 'good enough'.

I feel myself drooling over the iPhone but wishing it had a keyboard. And that seems worrying.