
Facebook, It's Like Instagram for Birthdays - jrlevine
http://www.jakelevine.me/blog/2012/02/facebook-its-like-instagram-for-birthdays/
======
adriand
A lot of web apps - both the established players and the startups - seem to be
in a "sort of, but not really" state. I'm pulling this from a column by Thomas
Friedman about Russia (
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/friedman-
ru...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/friedman-russia-sort-
of-but-not-really.html) ) where he says that Russia is "sort of a democracy,
but not really". Applied to web apps, Facebook is sort of a way to keep in
touch with friends and family, but not really, because it's mainly a pile of
uninteresting crap streamed from a bunch of people you hardly know. Twitter is
sort of a way to follow interests, but not really, since it's mainly a vast
swamp of mind-numbing, hash-tag inundated stupidity that most people don't
read.

That's not to say there isn't value in these services, because there is - I
use both. It's just that it seems so half-assed. When you consider the ways in
which, say, the introduction of the telephone changed society, Facebook just
looks silly.

~~~
dasil003
> _When you consider the ways in which, say, the introduction of the telephone
> changed society, Facebook just looks silly._

Or maybe just less elegant. Part of the problem is there's not really an
obvious problem to solve. In the case of the telephone it was like: "what if
you could talk to someone instantly across hundreds or thousands of miles,
_without a telegraph operator_!". Then they did a lot of hard work to build a
network to meet this end goal, which only does one thing with a dead-simple
interface, and it changed the world.

With Facebook and Twitter it's a little trickier because what's the universal
goal? We already had email, newsgroups, chat rooms, blogs, etc. So the premise
is something like: "what if you could broadcast your thoughts and digital
content instantly to thousands of friends and followers?". Right away it's
sort of a head scratcher. If you think about it you come up with lots of
little niches where it's handy, but nothing that strictly couldn't be done
before. The secret sauce is that it's engaging and people like using it so you
have a powerful network effect. But at the end of the day it becomes a type of
noisy commons; It's heaps better than the truly public internet cesspools like
YouTube, but it is increasingly inadequate for individual needs.

~~~
dkrich
"Part of the problem is there's not really an obvious problem to solve."

Isn't that just a nice way of saying that Facebook isn't useful?

I think the interesting take-away from this article is not so much that
Facebook has changed the context by adding features that include a larger
network of people, but rather that perhaps Facebook is most useful when you
use it exclusively with a small network of people with whom you have very
real, close relationships. Suppose Facebook had exactly the same features that
it has now but was limited to college campuses where connections could be made
only with close friends and classmates. Would the experience really be any
worse than it was when the functionality was more limited?

When the author was in college and he had just recently joined Facebook (and
presumably most people he had ever met were just starting to use it) his
network was necessarily small and limited to those people whom he had recently
met and socialized with. As the years went by, more and more people joined his
network. But few, if any left.

The problem is that that is not an accurate reflection of real-world
relationships. Over time people prune relationships, either consciously or
subconsciously, but the point is that in the real world, relationships evolve
and end, but Facebook doesn't do a great job of evolving with those
relationships. Recently I find myself using Twitter more and more to the
exclusion of Facebook because on Facebook I get inundated with a mixture of
every kind of update, a very small percentage of which I care anything about.
I don't de-friend people because that is considered rude and what if I do want
to reconnect with that person someday?

With Twitter there are definitely times that I get inundated with annoying
tweets, but because I can quickly and easily stop following somebody, it is
very simple to maintain my network and keep the information presented to me
relevant.

~~~
dasil003
I don't disagree with any of the rest of your comment, but:

> _Isn't that just a nice way of saying that Facebook isn't useful?_

No it's not—along two axes. First, I should have said "it doesn't solve _an_
obvious problem", it solves many small problems of varying degrees of
obviousness to different people. Second, it is not a unique solver of these
problems.

Facebook is definitely useful, but it's not a home run in the way the
telephone was because communication is no longer a technical problem.

------
csallen
I was always perplexed by Facebook's decision to get rid of the birthday
gifting system (on someone's birthday, you could pay FB $1 to give them some
sort of picture as a gift). It wasn't popular among my friends at first, but
it eventually got to the point where every time it was someone's birthday,
they got at least _one_ gift from someone.

I can only imagine that if Facebook had pushed it hard enough, it would only
have become even more commonplace. When you have 500M+ users, each of whom has
a birthday once a year, and each of whom has numerous friends to wish him a
happy birthday, $1 gifts are nothing to balk about.

The opportunity they had reminded me of the story behind how the diamond
business itself created the profitable tradition of giving engagement rings
and wedding rings.

~~~
prawn
Your post immediately made me imagine a go-between that enabled people to send
a physical/voucher gift to an email address or social media account. Sender
would choose something and pay for it, but assign the recipient as a virtual
address. The recipient would then hit the go-between and arrange fulfillment,
choosing the postal address themselves.

If you could get it tied into the networks and built up as something of a
tradition within Facebook/Twitter /Pinterest (as you said, Facebook would be
perfect for it), it could get some traction.

Maybe have it trawl recent posts for gift suggestions in various price
brackets.

------
romaniv
Very similar to my thoughts. Plus, I have some other experiences to compare
to, and FB doesn't come out very well in those comparisons.

Some websites allow you meet new people and to get to know them better over
the years. You'd think "social" networks should do that as well, but they
aren't. In fact, Facebook sort of works in the opposite way. For the most
part, it's a collection of people whom you used to know, but whom you know
less and less as the time goes. It doesn't allow for much real communication
(which is essential in preserving any kind of meaningful relationships) and
it's designed to discourage speaking with "strangers". (Remember all those
warnings about not friending people you don't know?)

What irritates me to no end is that there are lots of people who seem to be
(socially) incapable of using email, IM or phone to share the same information
they share on Facebook.

~~~
dpeck
I don't see what you mean by "designed to discourage speaking with
'strangers'", it seems to me that the interest tags that Facebook has
implemented and the stream of people it suggests for you to be "friends" with
encourages exactly the opposite behaviour. There may be some lip service to
online safety, but everything else points to pushing users to expand their
networks.

As unintuitive as it seems to me, a sizable minority of people use Facebook as
a way to meet others, either for dating (read: hooking up with your friends
hot friends), shared interest, or just adding another source to the stream.
Perhaps this is what keeps others active on the network? The few who activity
seek out new connections keep everyone else just engaged enough to keep
posting pictures and a few lines about their life.

~~~
dfxm12
That stream of people supposedly represents people you already know but aren't
friends with on Facebook.

I agree with OP in that Facebook that greatly taken away the ability to find
people who are into a specific topic. I would like to find people in my area
who like the film "El Mariachi". There is a Facebook page for it here:
<https://www.facebook.com/ElMariachiMovie> I can see that 30,000+ people are
fans of the film. Great! However, I can't see any of these people (let alone
their proximity to me). The best I can do is maybe post something to the page,
which will NOT appear by default, and may or may not get lost in the noise
about other posts about actual Mariachis or maybe Mexican restaurants with the
same name. The functionality related to one of my favorite books is even more
bare (<https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Man-with-the-Golden-Arm>)!

This leads me to believe that (in the wake of privacy concerns) Facebook is no
longer designed to help you meet strangers. You might find someone with
similar interests, but it is likely to be a friend of a friend. This might be
intentional. It's not necessarily bad or wrong, but I think it is important to
call it out.

------
scelerat
Facebook is also great for organizing events. I don't know anyone who uses
e.g. Evite anymore. Social chatter.

I'm not generally a fan of how ubiquitous FB seems to have become recently,
but when everyone is on the same network and that network has some simple
tools for doing socially useful things (making plans with people lots of
people and carrying on idle chatter), that's handy.

------
RandallBrown
More than anything I miss the "How are you connected" feature that was sort of
a six degrees of Kevin Bacon for every person in your school. I would spend a
lot of time picking completely random people almost always finding a
connection.

I guess the graph got too big.

------
chauzer
"So should I un-friend that girl I met at a party five years ago but haven’t
spoken to since? Oh wait, you make that nearly impossible. Plus, how then will
I know that she needs my help to kill a rival Mafia?!"

If you no longer care about someone's updates or anything that's going on in
their life, you can remove them as a friend. I know tons of people who have
removed people from their friends lists. Or if someone plays too many games
and you dont like seeing that update on your feed, mute those types of posts
or posts from that user.

~~~
jc4p
It's actually quite difficult to remove a friend. You have to go to their
individual page, scroll down, look at a text link on the bottom left of the
page, click "Yes" in the confirmation box.

I wish I could just navigate through my friends list and remove friends right
from there just like how I can add them to groups or lists or anything I want.

~~~
falling
Actually, you can just hover their name anywhere on the site (including your
friends list), hover the “Friends” button and click “Unfriend”. It hardly gets
easier than that.

~~~
mechanical_fish
A: Anything you have to do by hand up to 400+ times is not particularly easy.
It's an hour's mind-numbing work.

B: It's only easy if there's no cognitive load to unfriending someone. If you
have to call them up in your mind, decide if they're still a friend... that's
thought, and the emotions involved can be literally overwhelming depending on
your personality.

C: Do the people you unfriend get alerted in any way? Take everything I
alluded to in point B and raise it to the third power, because now every click
is also a social signal...

~~~
falling
A: True, but “mind-numbing” does not mean “quite difficult”. Also, if you have
400+ Facebook friends you wish you hadn’t I think it’s your fault, not
Facebook’s. I don’t expect any service to provide marginal functionality like
that. You do that once and from then on you think more carefully before
accepting someone’s request.

B: True, but the parent was talking about UI.

C: No.

------
corin_
*"It was my Birthday a couple of weeks ago. From my 527 friends, I received 52 birthday wishes on Facebook. That’s 10% of my friends — more activity in one day than I saw in an entire year prior. Who are these strangers posting on my wall? I haven’t spoken to some of them in 5 years. What a wonderful treat to hear from them on my birthday."

This paragraph pretty much sums up why I deleted my Facebook account - either
two or three (bad memory..) years ago on the 10th of January, the day after my
birthday. I never hated Facebook, I never had any problem with the company...
I just realised, having got a bunch of emails telling me that people who don't
know me well enough to tell me in person, or on the phone, or on skype/msn, or
via sms, had left birthday wishes on my wall, that I hadn't had a use for it
in quite a while before then.

~~~
rhizome
I wish Happy Birthday to people I haven't spoken to in 25 years (apologies for
being old). I wish it to people I don't really know (members of a creative
collective I belong to). I wish it to any of my friendsters that have
birthdays on the day that I happen to visit FB. It's not so random as it
sounds, either, I have fewer than 200 FB friendsters.

Most people think it's nice to receive birthday wishes, and if you're simply
not getting them from the people you want to get them from, that's not their
fault.

Then again, I turn off email notifications for this stuff so I don't get that
kind of inundation that I saw in years past. The only email I get from FB is,
coincidentally, the one that tells me whose birthday it is this coming week.

~~~
mstefanko
It's a nice sentiment, but sometimes I wonder what is the point as well. I've
often thought of deleting facebook for similar reasons. Not necessarily
because a flood of emails regarding people of whom I'm not invested in decided
to jump on a birthday band wagon. But I think a piece of what he's saying, is
why bother. It's just a reminder that the majority of people you've told
yourself you're there for(facebook that is), you know to keep up with these
peoples lives, aren't really all that important to you. If it takes a flood of
copy and pasted "happy bday!" messages from people who don't talk to you on
days facebook doesn't tell them exactly what to say..To open peoples eyes to
that... so be it.

~~~
rhizome
Why does a nice sentiment have to have a point?

~~~
mstefanko
Could probably rephrase this, as a nice sentiment can be very nice with no
point at all. But the "happy birthday!" messages on facebook, imo, have lost
their meaning and relevance a long time ago. There's no thought or effort that
goes into this action. In the early stages of facebook, there was still a
couple more steps that had to be taken to get that message to the old
acquaintance. Thus, albeit small, a little more meaning. "Oh, frank, he
actually took those couple steps, thats so nice."

Now, as a society, as well as on facebook, we're a step away from automating
our wishing people happy birthdays. That progression is what is slowly
chipping away at that "nice sentiment." For all I know, you write heartfelt
messages to old acquaintances, leaving them feeling awesome that you cared to
write to them on such a day. But the vast majority don't, facebook tells them
to say happy bday to these people [list of names]. Without even leaving the
page, and following exactly what facebook tells you to say, you've said the
most generic thing you can possibly say to someone on their birthday.And to
top it off, you haven't said anything to that person since last year on that
day. And again, by "you", I mean the majority of people, not you personally.

The occasional person will go the "extra mile" sticking the persons name at
the end of the message, or saying something like "hope you're doing
well!"..It's just an illusion that that doesn't mean much of anything. I'm not
saying I hate getting 100s of "Happy bday's" from people I don't talk to or,
in a lot of cases, even know. Or that people are assholes for routinely
wishing every single person on their friends list a big happy birthday. But
the sentiment really isn't even there anymore, to me. All facebook has done
for us, as far as birthdays and keeping in touch with old acquaintances in
this manner is concerned, is make the actual efforts, like phone calls and
real personal messages, even more valuable.

~~~
rhizome
That's all in your interpretation. _You_ have devalued the birthday wishes you
receive, _you_ feel your birthday wishes are insincere, _your_ friends aren't
sending you the kinds of birthday wishes you want. None of this mentions your
wishes for other people.

 _Now, as a society, as well as on facebook, we're a step away from automating
our wishing people happy birthdays._

The dystopia you imagine is already here in the form of Christmas Card lists.

------
mbesto
I understand the authors position, but FB's value is different for lots of
different people. Your journey on Facebook might be very different than mine
and I don't think that means there should be a blanket statement about
Facebook's value. Part of that value is that everything is inter-connected.

------
anttipoi
A friend entered a fake birthday when joining FB, thinking it was not really
something FB needs to know about.

The amount of greetings and happy wishes on one random winter day greatly
amused him.

~~~
recursive
My brother entered a false day intentionally thinking that it would be it
would be a good way to filter genuine from empty happy birthday wishes.

~~~
jacalata
My brother updated his birthday to the 9th of the current month for 8-9 months
straight and got birthday wishes every month. He carefully monitored for and
deleted people giving it away on his wall, and reading the posts (often the
same people for several months) was hilarious. 'hey man, I totally thought
your birthday was in May? oh well, happy birthday!'

------
there
_Who are these strangers posting on my wall? I haven’t spoken to some of them
in 5 years. What a wonderful treat to hear from them on my birthday._

I couldn't tell if this was sarcasm. Is it really a treat? An empty "happy
birthday" posted out of obligation that took practically no thought from
someone that has otherwise not bothered to contact you in 5 years and will
probably not do so for another 365 days?

~~~
jrlevine
Sarcasm :) sorry, I got a little snarky there.

Totally agree with you.

------
sharkweek
I have, and continually remove people from my friends list -- it makes no
sense for them to know what is going on in my life if I barely want to speak
to them in person. And wildly more important I really don't care what is going
on in their lives.

I take the Larry David approach and prefer to have less friends and
acquaintances

------
majani
Facebook really needs a 'friend clean up' tool ASAP. The problem of having
irrelevant friends is huge.

~~~
ryandvm
Facebook has no interest in reducing the complexity/value of your social
graph.

~~~
pvarangot
That tool would add complexity/value to your social graph. They'll get to
annotate nodes with the "removed using cleanup tool" information.

------
Pent
How did they know about my Facebook usage habits? Is this a thickly veiled
privacy article? Though seriously, it's easy to look back in retrospect and
summarize webapps like this. It would have been more interesting if they
discussed what the future could hold for Facebook. They are in a bit of a
"serves no real purpose" limbo for me and I'm sure many other people. I have
some fuzzy ideas on where they can take it to become more engrained in
everyday real life, but I don't think society is ready for what I have in mind
yet...

------
hack_edu
Instagram, It's Like Facebook for your iPhone. Really now, is it that hard to
provide Android support?

This is 2012. Whats the excuse?

