Some interesting views on MySpace and un-design live here: "Granted, the visual design of MySpace is simplistic, brutely exposing its content. But is that a knock against it, or a compliment to it?"

But two things I note:

• The *really* successful social sites (which I'll define, for the sake of argument, as the ones I use) are the ones where social activity is a by-product of some other benefit: image sharing for Flickr, diaries for LiveJournal, etc. Compare the links of LinkedIn and Orkut which are much more explicitly social... and much less useful from what I see.

• Isn't the big win about MySpace the music-related side of it - the instant association of music with people, which I'd guess resonates well with a teenage audience and explains why it's been a hit at the grassroots end of the music industry?
  

i.e. maybe it's not about "designing a social site" at all, in a visual sense, and much of the MySpace design is experienced not in the look and feel of its pages but in the constant association of audio with its users.

Now you can get air fresheners that capture the fragrance you really crave... MEAT!

Hibernate hitting patent problems?: "According to Firestar's complaint filed with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Red Hat, and specifically the Hibernate technology it acquired with JBoss, has infringed US Patent No 6,101,502, which relates to interfacing an object-oriented software application with a database."

Spotted in trendwatching: Dessert-only restaurants!

One of the really really great things about Roskilde was the days I got to spend lying in the sun reading 2 fantastic books: Northern Lights, the first in Philip Pullmans Dark Materials trilogy (why no-one has shoved it in my face whilst screaming ARMOURED FUCKING BEARS before now, I'll never understand), and Everyware by Adam Greenfield, which I'm going to re-read several times and spend a lot of time thinking about, because I suspect it's going to be quite influential on me personally.