How Facebook is Doing It Wrong, and Why It Doesn’t Matter
The Change
According to the New York Times, Facebook will soon be defaulting to having status’ (and by extension the replies that have largely replaced wall posts), photos, and videos show up as public content.
This follows on from the previous change that stripped Facebook of all of its filtering features and made it a twitter-like spamfest where all of your friends’ statuses are posted in chronological order and their pics/videos/etc. are less prominently displayed on the sidebar below the fold.
All of this amounts to Facebook essentially acting frightened of Twitter. In an effort to stem a tide away from their site, they try to make it more like twitter. I think this is a terrible idea, personally.
Why This is Bad
Facebook is completely missing the boat. This is a bold statement, since obviously facebook is huge, powerful, and hugely successful. What has, until the last few months, been an exercise in a well planned, masterfully focused campaign to drive people to a site because it serves a real and profound need has turned into typical startup-style flailing at a perceived competitor.
On the other hand, it’s not exactly a new sentiment. Every change facebook brings on there is a large and wailing group of users who complain that they don’t want it. I’d argue this is different. The previous layout changes merely changed the look and navigation of the site. These changes go much much farther. They change the entire purpose of the site.
The thing that made Facebook really catch fire was its ability to connect people who otherwise would not have been able to find each other. Not random connections, as a dating site creates, but connections with lost friends, distant relatives, and the people who throw the parties you love to go to.
But the truth is, no one wanted to see every waking thought from that group of people. The interest was in keeping general tabs on all of those people without overloading yourself with every single detail of their lives. Facebook’s recent changes threaten to throw every detail of the life of a third cousin twice removed you’ve met twice in your life at you, and this is highly undesirable. Especially when combined with all the other distant relatives and childhood friends who are likewise spamming you.
The reason this works on twitter is because I can run my twitter follow list like a petty dictator. I will unfollow an uninteresting or noise-spammy person on twitter at the drop of a hat without any fear of consequences. This allows me to filter the noise level to an extreme level. I can’t really do that on facebook, though, because unfriending relatives or other people in my real life circle of friends carries with it social consequences that are unacceptable.
So, there are two problems with this change:
- They leave people who want to have that general overview of their friends/family/childhood friends out in the cold. There is no service that can perform this task anymore.
- By making facebook more like twitter, facebook actually PROMOTES twitter. The more they sell people on the value of a spamfeed, the more people will want to go to a site that allows them the freedom to spam without social consequence.
But… Why Doesn’t It Matter?
In the end, though, it’s important to understand that all this doesn’t matter. Facebook right now is in the position that MySpace was in several years ago. They dominate the market so thoroughly that they can push these changes through and people don’t feel a sufficient pull of another product’s network effect for it to matter.
Twitter stands to gain from these changes, for the reasons above, because they do have a network effect in place and are growing strongly. There is a feeling of newness about Twitter that Facebook no longer has. Unfortunately, Twitter is not positioned to take complete advantage of this simply because they only supply one side of that coin. The people frustrated by Facebook turning into Twitter are not likely to move to something even worse for their needs than Facebook unless they find the appeal in that mode of communication. As long as their childhood friends and distant relatives and the only good event invite system everyone can agree on are on Facebook, there’s no point in leaving.
But if someone wanted an opportunity to take some of Facebook’s pie, now would definitely be the time in my opinion. I think it would take a company like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo to push something like that through fast enough to take advantage, but I suspect they’re all too slow moving for that to be likely.