Oskar Krawczyk – blog.olicio.us

That was a weird experience, for the fist few minutes looking for an announcement informing on some kind of a Last.fm – Facebook fusion. Well… What I did found was something explaining a complete site re-design makeover – which (oddly) reminds me of Papa Roach front-man and his normal-guy-to-emo-look-in-one-year.

It’s hard to say whether I do like it or not but at least what I can do is a short pro/con list.

Cons

Why exactly does it look like Facebook? I mean, come on, the current version is one of a kind, has its own cool feeling going on. Don’t get me wrong here – I’m all for simple and minimalistic design, but not like this – there’s a reason why I don’t use Facebook, I simply don’t like the UI.

The player is pretty much the centre of everyone’s attention at the moment – which is not a really good idea for me (at least not on the users’ profile). Which brings me to the point that latest played tracks get a bit lost between the huge player and big…ish user-info box. On top of that it looks a bit retarded – i like the one from Purevolume.com better.

Recent visitors are now only available on the home (ex-dashboard) page. I’d like to have it back on my profile page, please?

I love the navigation… NOT (couldn’t help myself). Let me throw some adjectives here: hideous, odd, confusing, facebookish and whats-with-the-line-thingy.

Coding-wise, why oh why are these guys still using Scriptaculous, really? Scriptaculous? The oldest, most buggy, slow, glitchy framework out there. Why not the un-famous YUI (a life-based example how good it can be!) Or one of the really good ones, Mootools or even jQ.

So these are the things that probably ain’t going to change with a future update. Time for pros.

Pros

One of the things I was looking towards to is the new recent activity feature. Good job.

Finally you can post a profile message which doesn’t have to be separated in two shouts because of a 400 chars limit. Although 1000 characters is not as much as one might think – I’d say 2000 is.

I actually really like the whole Library thing and the fact that (finally) we can remove music from it.

There are a lot of some minor features which have been tuned-up a notch:

• music tagging tool which now uses a nice auto-completer
• album listing now fetches the information about a release being able to buy from affiliates instead of putting a blank link pointing to iTMS and/or Amazon
• etc.

Generally I think it’s a step forward, a small one – feature-wise – but still. The only gap from me being completely for it, is the Facebookish feel. Although, it’s a simple matter of getting used to it.