Facebook announced some major changes to their platform yesterday. Many of these changes are enormous leaps in technology. Many of these changes will result in brand new behaviors. Many of these changes will revolutionize industries.
I have honestly given up fighting it. Facebook, you win.
Google+ is going to have to bust their ass to keep up. Facebook is on a mission to own the web and Google will fall further behind everyday that Facebook extends beyond “Like” into every verb you can think of.
I do have two complaints:
- The ticker
- “Facebook knows best”
Facebook’s Ongoing UI Problem
Facebook is not short on big ideas. They are not short on superb technologies. They are however blind to elegance and simplicity in design. The ticker on the right sidebar is UI vomit. It’s a horrible eye sore and it’s a distraction.
Facebook could’ve very easily created a music section, a games section, a movie and TV section, but instead we have a real time ticker feed that can’t be hidden without a Google Chrome extension.
Everything is mashed together into one feed so if I’m browsing a specific friend list, I still see whatever Facebook wants to show me. Doesn’t it make more sense to show me what my friends are listening to when I’m listening to music, or show me friends TV or Movie activity when I’m looking to watch something?
You can imagine my surprise when Timeline turned out to look gorgeous (though I haven’t seen it first hand).
Facebook’s Ongoing “we know better than you” Problem
I can’t stand the default News Feed. I don’t like the idea of Facebook deciding FOR ME what is important. It’s the same reason I don’t use GMail’s priority inbox. This is why I don’t really care about the most recent Top Stories/Recent Stories update. It’s irrelevant to me. I can’t honestly understand why ANYONE uses the default news feed. It’s just noise.
I like control. It’s one of the reasons I’ve embraced G+. It’s also the reason why I was so elated when Facebook added smart lists and friend lists to the left hand sidebar.
For instance, friend lists used to be a chore to find and manage. Then Zuck gets on stage and says less than 5% of users use lists. Well isn’t that a convenient stat? Facebook deliberately creates the platform in such a way that people use it in a certain way, then uses that data to build the case for why they do things. What users REALLY want it control of their data; who it gets shared with and who’s data they see.
The Genius of Repackaging Old Ideas
Timeline? That’s a blog. Yeah, that’s it. But they redesigned it and hosted it on Facebook, so now it’s innovative?
Real time news ticker for light updates? Yeah, that’s called Twitter. But they puked that feature on the right side of my Facebook page, so now it’s innovative?
Facebook isn’t coming up with all new ideas, but they are taking ideas to the masses and SELLING it, and they are making a good case.
In all honesty, I’m more impressed with this series of updates than any other updates in the history of Facebook. It doesn’t change the following facts:
1) Zuck is a dork (albeit an extremely wealthy one), a poor public speaker and he overuses the world “social” in a way that equates all sharing activity as a social activity. I believe their is something deeper to the social experience than simply sharing everything. In Mark’s defense, he seems like someone that grew up with few friends, so I hardly expect him to understand deeper connections than updating your network from behind a computer screen. I also still want to punch him in the junk…there’s just something about him that is so exceptionally punchable.
2) These new changes open up a butt-load of new privacy concerns. It’s not that Facebook hasn’t built in many of the necessary controls, it’s that the average Facebook user will never understand it.
3) Facebook still needs to get someone from Apple’s UI team…DESPERATELY.
That is all. What do you think of the new changes?