We had a chance to catch up with the controversial Dane at his home in Mountain View, Calif., as he took a brief respite from his 12-city usability world tour. There's an annoying use of pop-up windows. Pop-ups are multiplying, and they're polluting my screen. People basically just kill them before they've even rendered, because they've seen them used so much in advertising. If you follow fashion too much, you will change all the time, and you will continuously antagonize your users.
Interactive design is interactive - people do things there.
That's why big changes feel so uncomfortable to users. Whereas in a magazine, for example, people don't have to do anything, they just have to read. Therefore you can actually make dramatic changes in the layout of a magazine and people will immediately know how to use it. If each service is trying to achieve different things, that lends itself to different designs. But you'd still see the same underlying principles, which are simplicity and not too much superficial stuff.