For a brief and glorious time, everyone’s social media profile could be different!
My MySpace page could be pickle green with Papyrus text and auto-play “Lips of an Angel” if I wanted.
Anything was possible.
But the customizability that helped grow MySpace into an internet titan was also its undoing. Most people aren’t graphic designers, so handing us the UI made the UX uneven (to say the least).
I saw the same thing happen in enterprise search. When clients could drive the algo, the quality of the results didn’t go up. They went way down.
The lesson?
Whether you’re building or buying tech, customization is only good if it’s exactly where you need it.
Anywhere else, and it just might kill you.
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