

 Facebook Users Who Hate Change Making Facebook Developers Hate Facebook Users  - pakafka
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/facebook-users-who-hate-change-making-facebook-developers-hate-facebook-users

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josefresco
Some revolt... as the commenter said they should just stop using the damn site
and leave the third party developers alone.

That fact that they _need_ classic Facebook so much they're willing to become
a 'developer' to exploit a profile work-around means they're more addicted to
Facebook than the average user.

It's a win-win for FB.

~~~
nostrademons
Not necessarily - pissed-off yet addicted users are often the driving force
behind adoption of competitors, should one arise. For example, Y!Mail adopted
its redesign about a year after GMail came out, and a lot of my friends that
had been loyal Y!Mail users (and GMail holdouts) switched because Yahoo was
taking away their UI anyway. Most of the modern Harry Potter fandom sites
(FictionAlley, SugarQuill, GryffindorTower) were created because
Fanfiction.net abolished their forums. The final nail in classic Netscape's
coffin may've been that they changed their UI for Netscape 6, so that IE5.5
was more like classic Netscape than the new Netscape was.

~~~
unalone
The difference is: name a web site that could POSSIBLY work as a replacement
to Facebook.

New Facebook is still fast. It's incredibly effective. It's just new, and as
such takes some getting used to. Once the change is done, people will adapt.
And the reason they will? Because no other web site has TRIED making a
platform as powerful as Facebook's. Not even Bebo or Virb come close.

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zzzmarcus
I used to run a fairly large social networking site (before it was called a
social network) with forums, photo galleries etc. and had a similar
experience. We changed the design fairly drastically and there was mass
revolt.

Two competing sites were started that were similar to our previous design. For
weeks it was all anyone talked about. People left, they said they'd never come
back and they joined the other sites.

After a month or two people started coming back. They started to see the
merits of the new design and features. After 3 or 4 months it was if nothing
had ever happened. The competing sites fizzled out and most of our users
returned.

Lesson learned was that people hate change but if it is change for the better
they'll generally recover from it.

------
hussong
Seems like they didn't channel the foreseeable hate properly.

~~~
electromagnetic
It reminds me of Microsoft's change from Hotmail to Hotmail Live, which took
10 times longer to load and glitched constantly and I now have like 400 unread
emails because I stopped using it. I now have a domain name in my own name so
I literally tell people my email is (first name)@(full name).com and it works
so much simpler.

However, the ironic thing is my email is hosted on the same server as my
brothers, yet I haven't seen or emailed him in like 6 months.

