When I acquired “my” first computer when I was younger one of the first things I did, back in the days of Windows 98, was change the wallpaper. Later I discovered the ability to change the colors of the taskbar and the GUI, I was thrilled! As I grew I moved on to discover sites such as Stardock which allowed for more customization and functionality. My desktop was changed weekly from one theme to another until eventually I was sick of the themes available and began creating my own.

It’s rather obvious that I was addicted to customization; though it seems that these days in the world of Web 2.0 and Linux many others love customization as well. Arguably one of the reasons that Twitter became such a success was the ease of customization it offered by allowing a custom color scheme and a background of your choosing. There are countless websites who offer free backgrounds and give advice about how to create your own from scratch with a simple Google search of Twitter Backgrounds. It’s crazy how something so trivial can spawn such a number of websites.

It’s become an art in itself to try and offer a balance between customization, stability, and consistency. A failed example of this would be MySpace, as demonstrated by this parody tutorial , with its atrocious number of visual hacks that makes web designers want to hurl. FPSBanana was a good example of customization until it literally started to fall apart, more than likely due to a lack of proper maintenance. There were so many unstable visual additions being made as the website grew that the site is unfortunately becoming a virtual grave yard as time goes on.

So where do we draw the line? It’s a tough call; Facebook is running smoothly with minimal customization, yet so is deviantArt with maximum customization. Perhaps it all comes down to the time and effort put into the maintenance process that keeps something running smoothly. Linux distributions have been running strong for many years as many keep appearing but nearly all of them have strong teams who keep the code clean and smooth. Perhaps it’s the community that keeps stability, as set in example by Myspace’s twinkling piles of crap. After all, the main reason I still use Firefox is because of the community’s effort to improve customization while maintaining stability. Finally another thing to consider is the targeted audience and their expectations on the amount of customization they wish to see. There’s probably a good reason why Facebook has minimal customization while deviantArt allows for much more.

It’s a delicate balance that’s hard to maintain. I stopped redesigning my desktop weekly these days because it made my own computer unstable after all. Customization is still very important to me but I use it in moderation; to maintain the stability, consistency, and a bit of my personality I expect to be able to see in my virtual world.