Today’s Guardian runs a piece on a new Facebook app Dramatic Whitespace - the ‘best app ever’ (yes, another one) according to Valleywag…
“Dramatic Whitespace is more than just a bit of silliness (though it's certainly that). It's a sly comment on the net's reigning design ethic: the cramming of as much stuff as possible into every bit of available space. The thought that a pixel might go to waste seems to fill site owners with dread. The worst examples of data overload can be found inside the social networks themselves. At Facebook's main rival, MySpace, people seem to compete to create the densest, ugliest pages imaginable. Photographs, videos, music snippets, wacky fonts and assorted digital bling are thrown together into eye- and ear-assaulting jumbles.”
… views no doubt shared by web-usability guru Jacob Nielsen. Carr then goes on to say:
“One thing's clear, though. In this age of endlessly abundant information, what's becoming most scarce is scarcity itself - the absence of data. That's why Dramatic Whitespace seems so compelling. It speaks to what we're most in need of today: a small, quiet clearing amid the digital brambles, a place where, to quote the poet Derek Mahon, "a thought might grow".”
So in the spirit of postmodernism I’ve just installed the app, but instead of getting a tranquil clearing of white space, I just get a message saying ‘No content to display’...???
Will persevere….
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The dotted boundary sort of shouts out cut here
... take it you've managed to get yours working then?
;-)