

Facebook Takes The Fast Lane To Boring - danhak
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/24/facebook-takes-the-fast-lane-to-boring/

======
unalone
Arrington doesn't "get" Facebook. His complaint about the messaging system is
proof of that. What he needs to understand, what ALL of these tech types need
to understand, is that Facebook is made for the casual user, not the power
user. Power users get punished, in fact: information gets diluted and the
system weakens.

The comments that've been posted here are proof of that. People talking about
bloated news feeds, damaged apps, or (my favorite) how "boring" the idea of
having friends is... this is all completely missing the point. Facebook is for
people that have friends, and want to interact with them when they're supposed
to be doing something else. And any attempt to make it into anything else will
fail.

I can testify to this, seeing as I'm Facebook's target customer. Just
graduated high school; I'm not extremely active comparatively but I have some
semblance of a social life. Facebook's systems are geared towards me. When I
get back from a prom, I can see photos of me and other people, and if I don't
know the other people we can talk over the pictures. If a friend wants to let
something out that he doesn't feel comfortable saying out loud, he writes a
note about it. Event inviting - good way of getting people to meet in person.
Shared items is the least-used feature on Facebook, and it's because that's
the one feature that gets used more by nerds than by normal people.

But TechCrunch and Scoble saw Facebook growing, they found that it was well-
designed - and in terms of small comfort features, Facebook blows every other
site out of the water - and they assumed that Facebook was meant for them.
Well, it wasn't. That's what makes it such a good site. Look at Virb, which
feature-wise is much more in tune with the tech world. There's a reason that
you don't see Virb brought up in comparison to Facebook. It's because it's
designed for critics, not the masses.

And - let's talk about apps a moment - application designers really don't have
a chance. I think Facebook knows this, too. Their platform isn't meant to
create value for the users so much as it is a means to weaken other casual
sites. Top Friends drew most of my MySpace-addled school towards Facebook.
Compare Friends took away the few Orkut users we had. These are not
productive. Not like Flixster is supposed to be, or Box.net, or even Flickr or
Digg or Last.fm. The products that add actual value to the service are the
ones doomed to fail. Because there's no market for productivity on Facebook.
Facebook is where large networks go to die.

Two years ago, when I wrote a bit for AllFacebook and used Facebook ravenously
(see: a new feed's worth of actions per day), I noticed a trend in people
types. Among the low-end social people, the people with just an illusion of a
social life, there was tremendous activity. These were people who checked
things every half hour. Among the majority of the users, though, there was
either no activity every day, or there was a status update activated via cell.
People were not using Facebook to manage their lives, they were using it as a
sort of back-up. An in-between. These were the people who would update their
top friends once every three days, which I would sneer at. "What a waste of
time," I thought, as I continued to productively check every 30 minutes and
respond to every message with essays (I like writing, whether for productive
use or no). Really, though, Facebook wasn't a time sink for those people. It
was a quick way to stay amused. These people, these casual users who go on for
Chat and status and little else, these people are the main market of Facebook.

The people who don't care about efficient profiles. The people who will be as
amateurish as they want because they know only their friends can see in. These
are the people Facebook knows it needs. Why else would it take so long to fix
up the profiles? It knows that most people don't WANT efficiency in profiles,
that when they're going on they're going on to waste a little time. But it's
not meant to be a constant thing, either. Assuming Facebook CAN be productive,
that's the fault. That's the mistake. No all-in-one site is meant to be
productive. That's not how you achieve productivity. Facebook is a pit, and
that's fine and healthy, as long as you KNOW it's a pit before you start.

A few weeks ago I removed all my friends but about 60 from the site, cleared
my profile, removed all my apps (including Photo and Shared Items), and it
gives me a much clearer picture of how it works from the average user's
perspective. I go on at most two times a day, and that's because a few people
are planning a meet-up and we're using Facebook to co-ordinate. When I
actually do things with friends, we call each other or just drive to each
other's houses. We don't need Facebook for that. Facebook becomes just a point
for those few times you want to plan things way in advance, or when you just
need to vent to friends. It becomes useful in a way. Not productive, but
useful. And what makes it useful are the things Facebook built itself: photos,
events, notes. Any applications beyond that are only good for amusement's
sake. The top app developers get that.

The people going to this conference, looking at the new technology, those are
the people that are going to lose. Because Facebook's not doing this to change
the tech world. They don't want to be Microsoft. They want to be MySpace: a
better MySpace, but a MySpace nonetheless. A pause in the middle of the day.
All this talk about integration with other services, opening up charges for
applications: forget that. Users don't care. The vocal users, they do. But
that's about .001% of all the users, IF that. And the rest of the world isn't
listening to them at all.

~~~
mlinsey
I think you were dead-on with your assessment right up until your last
paragraph where you say that Facebook doesn't _want_ to be anything more than
a brief time-waster. I think they very clearly do want to be something much
bigger, given their rhetoric "we're a social utility! we want to reward more
productive apps! we want to be a platform for the social web and make
information everywhere more open!" and given the tremendous financial
incentive to do so. Does anyone think that FB would fetch anywhere near 15
billion if it were aspiring to be just a brief time waster and not a new major
platform for the web? Not that the 15B was a real valuation, but you can bet
they are still aiming that high.

Anyway, I think that Facebook very much _wants_ to be a new Microsoft, a
platform for other valuable apps (if the apps that sit on top of Facebook
aren't valuable, then the platform itself isn't very valuable), but they find
themselves being stuck as a simple time-waster because that's what the bulk of
their userbase wants.

~~~
unalone
I think ZUCKERBERG wants to be much more. I don't think the entire company
does. Either that or they're fooling themselves significantly. I think we've
seen already that apps don't have a bright future, unless Facebook does a
MAJOR about-face. But see, from what I've seen, Facebook's just parroting
Apple right now. From design to ambition to strategy. And this is an example
of them following Apple again. But they don't have the powerful platform that
Apple does, and they can't play the same game. Nor can they play at
Microsoft's game. Microsoft appealed to the CORPORATE environment. Not to
college kids. The one route has a future of productivity. Not the other.

------
ricree
Have we really gotten to the point where something that surfaced just two
months ago as a rumor can actually be called vaporware?

I can see why the author of the article would be a little let down compared to
last year's platform launch, but this is still a pretty solid release. heck,
is it even necessarily a good thing for the site to drastically remake itself
every year?

If nothing else, anyways, a tightening of the excesses of some applications
goes a long way towards convincing me to go back to facebook.

------
pavelludiq
Facebook is boring to me as an idea. There is nothing in that site that would
be interesting to me. Social networks are boring, the only interesting thing
in them is people, and im apparently too antisocial or something, because i
don't find people that interesting. The only reason i have a MySpace account
is because of a friend of mines band(I don't actually use that account for
anything, just to look up shows)My Last.fm account i just check in on at time
to time to see my statistics for the week(i stopped using the social part of
the site) I also use it for quick info on bands and stuff.

~~~
ryanmahoski
Ego drives the collective hallucination part of the internet.

------
Philosophaster
Facebook started to become annoyingly bloated for me when the news feeds
appeared. The apps were the nail in the coffin.

