Facebook was a bit of fun for a while. I resisted joining for a long time and then joined, primarily to check out what all of the fuss was about and to research the platform. I quickly built a network of friends (some who I see in the real world and some I haven’t seen for ages. 2 months later, I’m REALLY over it. Heres 6 reasons why:
- Relationships aren’t so simple
I have a bunch of relationships with people I deal with, am friends with, live with, see rarely etc.. Each of those relationships has its own dynamic and no 2 relationships are the same. Facebook over simplifies the whole relationship dynamic, meaning that everyone who you are connected with is of equal importance. Sure, there are some simple algorithm governing what goes into your news feed, but generally, the people who’s news fills my feed aren’t the people who I would prefer to fill my feed. I have actually adjusted my Newsfeed Preferences to receive less news about some people, but I still receive a heap of news about them.
- Too much SPAM
I hate the fact that I have to wade through a sea of crap each time I review my inbox or notifications. Zombie invites, Jedi invites, Pirates invites etc. I couldn’t care less about some stupid game that someone in my network thought might be cool and was peompted by the application to SPAM everyone within coo wee!
All of a sudden application developers (read new age SPAMmers) are able to abuse people’s networks by virally sending out invitations to people’s friends en masse.
- I don’t want to install an application just to read a message
Those emails telling me that someone has written on my X Wall, when I don’t even have the X Wall application installed. Install application, read some message that is crap and not solely written to me. Uninstall application, untill the next time someone else does the same thing.
- Sponsored ads in Newsfeed
It’s my news feed. Not an ad feed!
- IS
Why does the status update have to start with IS. Why can’t I say Rob hates five things about Facebook instead of Rob is hating 5 things about facebook!
- All those people
How many contacts can you say you’ll actually stay in contact with? It’s great to see and hear from people you haven’t seen for ages, but generally, after the initial “Hi, how’s it? what’s been happening for the past 10 years? you married? got kids? oh how cool!” kinda stuff, those people will sit in your friends list, neglected. No way to piff someone without upsetting them. It all becomes too noisy, very quickly.
I’ve started a Facebook group about being over Facebook. Will people join or will they get over it first?
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how technology has changed the way we live. Last night, I called my mum at home. No answer. I then called her mobile. No answer. I sent her an SMS and she called me this morning. It made me think about how we used to contact people. Before answering machines and mobile phones, we used to call back, and call back and call back - until someone answered the phone. Today, we just make sure there is some record of our ping, and the ball is then in the pingees court.
Something else I am thinking about is how marketing must change in order to be effective in this time of social networks and mass connectiveness. People are now connected to their friends en masse, all the time! Need to have a question answered? Post it to Facebook and have a bunch of responses within the hour. Where is a good place to get new tyres for my car? Where should we go for dinner tonight, feel like Indian? Which mobile phone should I buy? These used to be the questions that marketers pondered. Need they bother any more? Is anyone listening to marketing anymore or is it all just spam?
I know that I pay much less attention to advertising or marketing than I used to. What I’m not sure about is whether that is because I am becoming older and more cynical wiser or whether I am more inclined to go to my network when I have a decision to make.
I think marketing/advertising is the one area that will suffer a lot from the change in the way people make decisions, but then again, I suppose the US$550 million that MySpace made from advertising revenue last year may counter that assertion.
What do you think?
I recently attended a great course - Designing With Users - at Hiser. While the majority of the concepts covered in the course were not new to me, the way that Hiser work them into a process for bottom up requirements gathering was fantastic. From user interviews/site visits, through affinity diagramming, collaborative design and ultimately user testing, you could really get a sense that the process ensures the end product is in line with both business and user needs.
Having just completed a project with Hiser, I was very impressed with their process, methodology, professionalism and documentation. Although we haven’t yet developed the product they assisted us with, you get the feeling that it will be well received by users and will have a positive impact on the business. The research and collaborative design process has ironed out issues with the interface and further testing closer to launch should ensure that the product is fit for purpose and well received.
Contrasting this approach with Facebook’s mini-feed mini-disaster it is clear to me that there is a point in every business (especially a Web 2.0 startup) where what has always worked suddenly fails. It is not possible or necessary for a startup to invest as much in research and UCD as a larger business with established clients. The mantra of the 2.0 startup has been “Deploy, test, refine”. But, what is the catalyst that changes that? In Facebook’s case it was the revolting (as in up in arms, not disgusting) users who were very rapidly very many.
It’s not surprising at all that Facebook’s designers were out of touch with who their users were and what they wanted. In the incredibly rapid growth do you think anyone at Facebook had the time or inclination to slow things down by doing some formal user profiling or research. Facebook has been all about geting it out. Fast!
What this case highlights is that at some stage, the users suddenly matter a whole lot more than they previously did. I doubt that there will be any long term damage to the Facebook brand as a result of this, but I’ll bet that they have started to think a lot more deeply about the implications of their deployments and will be more rigorous in their research and testing with users.
Amazing events on Digg today with users up in arms over Digg removing a post linking to those numbers (09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0) that the MPAA don’t want us to see. All activity on the front page of Digg is around posts linking to the #.
I find it amazing that Digg would even try to censor something that is:
- In the public domain
- So close to the hearts of its community (MPAA bashing)
I don’t think this will have any long term effect on Digg, it will return to normal over the next couple of weeks (yes, I think it will take a little while to settle down) but I think it will have an enormous impact on Web 2.0, user generated and the legal responsibility of a service provider to moderate, control and govern its users.
A lot of organisations will now think twice before giving users as much power as they have been given by the first wave of user generated sites.
Things will change. Web 2.0 has just grown up.
Viva la revolution!
Update: Digg have given up moderating and have decided to go down fighting. I think that may be the end.
Following on from my recent post about Photoshop moving online, I read this great post on Joel Spolsky’s site. Joel asserts that the new API is HTML and that the Windows API is in trouble. His premise is this;
- People buy an operating system because of the applications they can run on it
- People buy Windows because you can run a great variety of apps on it
- People don’t buy Mac’s or Sun’s not because they are inferior operating systems but because of the limited apps available
I definitely agree with that. I have resisted buying a Mac for a long time because I know what Windows apps work for me. I am now seriously considering buying a Mac with an Intel chip and BootCamp. Best of both worlds hey?
When this new and exciting arena of rich web apps matures, what will Microsoft’s competitive advantage be? It won’t be that their OS has the most applications written for it.
When Mac users and Linux users and Sun users are able to access the same software online as Windows users, people will pay more attention to the features, stability and security of the OS than they will to the variety of software that was written for that platform.
Further, it seems logical that developers will embrace the cross platform HTML API in order to increase their reach and OS compatibility.
Whether the application is built in Ajax or Flash or some other technology is irrelevant, although I do agree with Jeff Atwood that JavaScript will become more popular on the grounds that that is where the lions share of the development community is working.
The new uTorrent web interface is a great example of the power of Ajax to avail the core features of a desktop app online. It’s lacking a bit of polish and all of the features of the desktop version but it lets you get the job done!
Viacom’s suing of Google for $US 1 million is laughable. Copyright is such a massive issue in this age of digital distribution and it appears that copyright holders are getting increasingly desperate in their attempts to plug the dike.
Viacom and Google were obviously unable to reach a compromise in their negotiations so Viacom decided to become the schoolyard bully who didn’t like it when he got pushed around and ran to the head master.
“After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users,” Viacom said. “Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video.”
It is slack, lazy, opportunistic, unnecessarily aggressive and ultimately foolish for Viacom to pursue Google over this. GoogTube certainly isn’t the only place in the world where Viacom’s copyright is being infringed but they are the only target because they have the deepest pockets.
Seems to me that Viacom’s legal department have spotted some low hanging fruit and they are heading in for the harvest.
I think this page is more of a criminal web page than a web page about a criminal.
I get angry every time I go to MySpace. Thing is, I just don’t get it! I don’t understand how a site that breaks just about every researched, well understood and documented usability/user experience rule or principle can be one of the most popular and successful properties on the internet. It would have been OK in 1998 but it looks like that is where it is trapped and will stay forever as long as people keep using it like they do!
I ‘get’ user generated. I heart user generated. I think user generated is what the internet is all about. But, I don’t get MySpace!
The page in question, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, was created by the Arkansas Police Department as an attempt to raise public awareness of a wanted armed robber. It seems like a good idea and I’m really impressed with the constabulary embracing the internet and being open to trying new things.
What pisses me off most is the fact that my entire office jumped up and came to my desk when my computer was hijacked by the Citizens on Patrol music that started playing on page load. Further, take a look at the page! Even the MySpace navigation has been made illegible by the greenback background. How can MySpace allow their own navigation style to be hijacked by the user?
So, I guess I really don’t see how the social attraction of MySpace can remain with such poor usability, usefulness, readability and desirability
At a time when my team is busy defining a user experience strategy, I have to ask myself, why do we bother?
Massive news today that Adobe are planning to release an online version of Photoshop within 6 months.
This is an enormous leap and highlights the potential that Ajax and Flash driven rich interfaces have to change the way we use computers.
One of the more interesting points is that Adobe plan to make this online Photoshop free for consumers. They expect to make revenue from advertising on the site, acknowledging that if it works for Google, then it can work for us. I have been a fan of picnik but I fear that when presented with a choice of online photo editor, the peeps will vote for the Photoshop brand.
Great to see Adobe coming out on the front foot with this one, instead of trying to protect their shrink wrapped products. I think it will prove successful. Microsoft - are you watching?
OpenID will succeed.
Where Microsoft failed, the open source, non profit OpenID will work. It will work because people are sick and tired of trying to manage multiple log-ins across all of the sites that they visit, there is no company at the centre for people to get nervous about handing their information over to and in these highly competitive times, where the user is king, websites are falling over themselves to make the user experience better than their competitors.
In every verticle we will see one player jump on board in order to offer a better experience and we will then see every competitor jump on board, not to be outdone.
I give it 18 months. By the end of 2008 I believe we will see 80% of the most popular websites supporting OpenID.
Peter Cashmore over at Mashable is convinced that Google are doing evil by embedding GOOG Video in the SERP’s.
I beg to differ. I think this is a classic example of the ‘tall poppy syndrome‘ and a case where Peter is only kicking up a fuss because it is Google.
Let’s break it down a little bit:
- Google doesn’t appear to be skewing the organic results to inflate Google Video or YouTube content.
- Google isn’t serving other people’s content directly on the SERP.
- Google are merely providing a service that enhances the user experience by delivering its content on the SERP, thus removing the need to go to a new page or open a new tab.
Evil? No. This is merely a company trying alternate ways of serving its own content. Nothing evil in that.
Smart? Yes. By enhancing the user experience, Google are more likely to keep their users happy.
Bad for competitors? Can’t see how. As long as Google continues to fairly index all content then its competitors have as good a chance at a high SERP ranking as a Google owned property.
Good for consumers? Yes.
Nice one Google!
