It seems like you can’t read two status updates on Facebook these days (or last week anyway) without getting an earful about how much people dislike the new layout. And that’s cool. I mean, I get it… change is hard, and the fact that people are engaged enough to get up in arms over the situation clearly indicates that FB has been doing *something* right all along.
But here’s where I’m getting confused… See, while I can appreciate (and agree with!) the sentiments of everyone who feels uprooted and/or underwhelmed by the new layout, I’ve also come to terms with the fact that unanticipated updates like this are, to some extent, part and parcel of using web applications like Facebook, Gmail and etc. The most successful web apps however, understand that their success is entirely derived from the “consent” of their users, and that burning up too much of this consent and goodwill too quickly can lead to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. And we all know where that leads.
So my point is, if you’re going to make a wholesale change like the one Facebook just made, you better have a pretty damn good reason for it. One reason that tends to motivate a lot of people (perhaps none more so than Web 2.0 CEOs) is money. And so it stands to reason that Facebook must feel pretty confident that their new layout is somehow going to increase revenue. As Robert Scoble writes:
Don’t get distracted by the current design that looks sort of like Twitter. Twitter showed that businesses can co-exist on the social graph along with people. Zuckerberg is smart. He saw that Twitter was going to make a crapload of money (that’s why he tried to buy Twitter) and instead of being depressed by being turned down by @ev he decided to phase shift Facebook.
Makes sense, right? More and more businesses are starting to comprehend the value of Facebook & Twitter as marketing tools, alongside more “traditional” channels like email and flash/banner ads. Consequently, Twitter and Facebook want to tweak their services to accommodate the needs of the people who are actually *paying* for shit, but hopefully in such a way that manages not to offend the majority of users. Better yet, they’d make this change in such a way that it actually increases the value of the service for both business *and* end users!
On the Twitter side of things, everything seems to be moving along swimmingly. Companies like @Zappos, comic artists like @rstevens, and even the folks @TelltaleGames are all successfully reaching out to fans and customers in a mutually beneficial way on Twitter, and the fact that users have complete and total control over the way they choose to receive messages from the companies and artists they’re following means that the entire system is kept relatively honest. (Certainly compared to email! =) Abuse the trust or patience of your followers with too many blatant sales pitches and they won’t be your followers anymore, end of story. Not too sound like I’ve had too much of the Kool-Aid, but it works pretty damn well.
Meanwhile, in Facebook-land, there are a number of… issues. Despite the fact that the most common knock on the new layout is that it makes FB totally redundant with Twitter, they seemed to have screwed up on implementing the most essential aspect of the Twitter user experience, i.e. a completely transparent and frictionless method for managing the way posts from the people, companies & artists you’re following are delivered. Case in point, Telltale Games has been steadily adding “fans” on Facebook for the past several months & we can only assume that these people weren’t coerced into becoming fans, and would hardly object to an occasional message or update from Telltale in their news feed. FB clearly gets this too, as a direct precursor to rolling out the new layout was granting fan pages (i.e. Telltale, Zappos, etc.) the ability to post “status updates” that would, just like any other such update on FB or Twitter, be presented to users in their main feed.
In the week or two directly after the new layout launched, this was working exactly as expected, and Facebook page admins were able to reach out to their “fans” just like they could on Twitter. Page views went up, fans were more engaged, and it seemed like everything was going great. Now I don’t know what metrics Facebook is looking at internally, or if they just let the complaints from all the new-layout-haters get to them or what, but at some point they pulled an amazingly clumsy about-face and started *blocking* the majority of fan pages status updates from reaching end users’ news feeds. In other words, unless you were paying very close attention to a one-time “notification” from FB, and manually opted back in, you are no longer recieving status updates, new videos and event updates from all the companies, artists & etc. that you’ve become a fan of.
Why would they do this? I have a couple of theories:
- Complaints like “People are abusing the system! There’s too much spam! Facebook sold us out!” (and so on) gave them cold feet & they decided to pull the plug. The problem with this reaction is that, unlike Twitter, where end users are in TOTAL CONTROL of their communication preferences, Facebook obscures this functionality in a clusterfuck of buried dialogs which most users are probably completely unaware of. People are bothered by spam!? No shit, sherlocks! How about you just give them some tools to manage it and let the situation police itself (the way it does on Twitter) instead of just castrating the whole system?
- Another thing that distinguishes Facebook from Twitter is the fact that FB is trying (unsuccessfully, by many accounts) to sell advertising throughout their site. Is it possible that by granting fan pages the ability to reach users in a much more effective way (i.e. status updates) and for FREE no less, that Facebook gutted their ad revenue overnight? And might nervous investors have ordered Facebook to STOP THE BLEEDING immediately, by any means necessary? Hmm…
Anyway, fuck if I know what the right solution to this “problem” is, but I just hope that somebody over at Facebook is trying to figure it out, because I certainly can’t be the *only* one growing increasingly impatient with their clown-shoes operation.
And don’t even get me started on search. (Facebook Search = EPIC, EPIC, EPIC FAIL, while Twitter Search = CORE of the whole GD BUSINESS!)
