The Media Object

What is the internet made of? At least the UI layer is mainly composed of media blocks. I talked about the Facebook stream story before, and all the tiny objects of which it is composed. For the most part, the stream story is made up of the media object repeated over and over.

The media object is an image to the left, with descriptive content to the right, like this Facebook story:

The media object: an image to the left, descriptive content to the right.
The media object

The content area on the right can contain any other objects. In this case, it contains text, but we could put lists, grids, or even other media objects inside. As we’ve seen before, there are actually many different versions of the media block on the Facebook website (and on most websites). These five are just a few examples of the way this object might be used:

Several media objects: an initial one as in the previous image, with two more: the first is a profile image on the left, and a comment field on the right, while the second is another profile picture on the left, with comment content on the right.
Variations on the media object