Recently the Iranian election occurred, and while the western world's media was asleep a couple Saturday nights ago, Iranians were uploading cell phone videos of what was happening in the streets directly to YouTube and Twitter was very much alive with the latest information.  When international media was officially banned, major networks had no choice but to rely on social media as a source.  There was no other way to get the inside scoop.  The relatively low barrier to entry for using a system that was designed like Twitter was made it accessible in an extremely limiting scenario.  Indeed, business is differentiating itself - not only with functionality but also with design.

The way social media has climbed into our lives is unmistakably due to the advancements in design.  Adoption has followed this - take Myspace vs. Facebook for example.  Rupert Murdoch is now wondering why his $580 million investment in customizable user pages has a userbase that is migrating to the common-look-and-feel based Facebook.  Besides the ubiquity factor (people like to go where all their friends are), I would put the issue squarely on the design of the interfaces.  It's much simpler to get social tasks done through Facebook.  Myspace, on the other hand, feels like it has been made out of roughly 20 different websites.  People might not readily identify this as a reason, but it is certainly something that they can feel.  And in an internet culture where customization has traditionally been a big selling point for any user experience, it seems that the content has become more important.  Facebook recognizes this, so they've spent a lot of effort on their interface, sometimes with good results and sometimes with not so good results. 

Design has always had a role in interfaces, but with so many forms of media converging into one space, the importance of design has never been greater.  From user-generated content in the web2.0 context, to newspapers, music labels and television networks bringing their entire operations online, the web has a unique strain on it that is really testing designers abilities to plan for accessibility, expansion, use and sharing.  How does all this information come together?  How are people supposed to grok all of it?  What design considerations can be used to address extremely rapid growth and activity?  

We are finding that users have an appetite for rich content as well as bite-sized 140 character updates, and that there is application for both depending on the nature of the content.  It is becoming clear that relatively simple things, like tag clouds, help identify trends and issue-context at a glance, and these kind of visual cues can help drive future conversation while giving a snapshot of what has been popular to date.

How can we apply something like this to different media? Radio charts have been helpful, in the past, for filtering what music is popular and new.  In this instance, priority or significance is given to what is on top of the charts.  This can be directly translated into a tag-cloud treatment, where the higher up a song is on the charts, the larger the font-size for the track name.  The number one song doesn't have to be at the top anymore, it simply needs to be biggest.  Then musicians can actually have "big hits" instead of "#1 hits." ;)

What other opportunities do you see as the various forms of media converge online?  What have we learned from these industries as they've come together?  What design ideas do you think will work in the future, and what do you think is going to fail?

If anyone's interested in where the photos came from - I came across an intertype linecasting machine this weekend past and decided to take a few shots of it.  More photos of the linecasting machine are available on my site.