Design 21: Social Design Network

There have been plenty of these alternative configurations of the shapes flying around.

Basically, any offensive four letter work will work!

The London 2012 (Olympics) brand was launched this week. Basically, there's been nationwide outrage. The general opinion is, it's terrible. There's plenty of justification flying around for what the shapes represent but most of them lack substance.

What do you think?

I agree with Manuel, the internet wouldn't exist without open source contributions. The problem is, big business will always take an interest in anything that manages to generate attention passively. A product or service that can reach customers with little or no advertising spend has to be appealing for reasons other than their social good.

In most cases, it all comes down to how much big business can squeeze out of a service before it falls out of favour with it's users.

Consider MySpace. As far as I can see, it's main source of revenue has always been through advertising. It has been clever in the ways in which it generates this advertising revenue (leveraging targetted music, promotions etc..) but I think it'll be interesting to see how the service changes as MySpace's new owners decide it's time they saw some return on their investment. Surely they're not expecting to see enough return through advertising revenue to justify the purchase cost?

As soon as big business gets involved and return on investment becomes the priority, the initial idea behind these services will become obscured behind quarterly balance sheets.

Flash definitely has it's place. Macromedia used to say it was installed on 98% of computers. I'm not sure how those stats have changed recently.

I think flash video is a fantastic tool in terms of accessibility. It can compress and deliver video online better than anything else out there. For users without a broadband connection, this is great.

I guess the point is, use flash for the right reasons. Choose your delivery method based on the content you're pushing and the audience you're aiming it at.