I’m not really the best person to ask about Facebook anymore. Although I keep up with announcements and sometimes mess with new features, I just can’t use it anymore.
I know, it’s funny right, considering how many posts I wrote about Facebook here over the years, but there are a couple reasons why I don’t use it.
First, I don’t trust a word they say about their intentions. Facebook is a business, and they serve their investors first. This doesn’t mean people working there are evil, quite the contrary from what I know. It does mean that making money comes first.
Yeah, I feel the same way about Google, “don’t be evil” notwithstanding.
Second, they just don’t have a good way to segment and target content, and no, groups isn’t good enough, no matter what Paul (@ppedrazzi) says. The lack of an opt-in feature is a glaring issue, and just because photo tagging had that before, doesn’t mean it’s a good implementation. I do give them credit for trying to solve the real problem though.
Facebook needs channels, which would make sense in a way that lists and groups don’t. I’m a channel. I broadcast baby pictures to family; I broadcast Portland news to Portlanders; I broadcast AppsLab and Oracle news to Oracle people.
Simultaneously, I watch those same channels and expect similar content from them. This is a bit of groups and a bit of lists.
This is a problem Google understands, but who knows if they can really solve.
Earlier in the week, Facebook and Bing deepened their social search relationship.
It might be creepy to start, but this is a good thing. Social search is good for the internets, and even better for enterprises. Turns out that collective knowledge is frequently better than an algorithm. All it took was collecting 500+ million people to prove it.
One thing lacking from the announcement was any improvement in Facebook’s own search, which is pitiful for no good reason.
Also noteworthy in Facebook news is their announcement yesterday of support for even more ways to buy Facebook Credits, inching ever closer to a global currency. This could be a hugely complicated and dangerous problem for the World’s economy, no kidding.
Think about it. What does Facebook use as an exchange rate? Probably USD. This creates issues when you consider the fluctuation in exchange rates, e.g. Credits purchased today may be more/less valuable in a week. People could either un/consciously begin speculating in currency through Credits, or Facebook might establish its own monetary unit to control the valuations.
It’s messy any way to slice it.
Anyway, with 500 going on 600 million users, Facebook can do what they want with virtual impunity. It’s difficult to argue with an international body that supposedly represents the interests of that many people, making the third largest such body in the World.
Chew on that for a minute.
Facebook keeps getting smarter too, as we willingly give it data about ourselves.
One example is this rather mundane item I noticed in my News Feed today.
Aggregated under this post were a handful of happy birthday wall posts. Seems harmless until you factor in all the data points that go into it.
- Facebook knows it’s this dude’s birthday.
- Facebook knows this dude is male. NB dude is gender neutral to me.
- Facebook knows these wall posts were wishing this dude birthday greetings.
I can’t confirm it, but I suspect this post displays to me because I didn’t write on this dude’s wall to wish him a happy birthday. So, there’s a possibility this is a social obligation reminder.
And, it’s not far-fetched to think that Facebook noted that people who did write on this dude’s wall to convey birthday wishes. That nugget could easily be used to measure the strength of the relationship between these people and this one dude.
That’s what I would do anyway.
Does any of this bother you? Do you trust Facebook to represent your interests?
Find the comments.
Twitter Comment
Facebook Flexes [link to post]
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“Facebook is a business, and they serve their investors first.” http://www.dilbert.com/strips/2010-10-13/
Oh, and the image skitched-20101015-092314.png is broken (for me at least).
Exactly. Fixed the image, sorry about that.
“NB dude is gender neutral to me.”
I think so too, but the female police officer (in the UK) I called dude did not feel the same way. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Excellent point about channels. One morning, someone at church approached me and said he was confused about what was in my Facebook feed. The reason for this is because just about all of my content flows into FriendFeed, and all of my Friendfeed content flows into Facebook. This results in a very broad range of content on my Facebook feed, including posts in my own four blogs, tweets that I write, tweets that mention me, items that I find in Google Reader, songs I like in last.fm, and Disqus comments such as this one. Now part of this is my fault for having all of this content flow into Facebook from FriendFeed; with this type of setup, it’s hard to tell the original source of the item, or even who wrote it (tweets and Google Reader items written by others appear to look just like the things that I wrote). But even if my incoming Facebook feeds were better organized so that people could tell what’s what…that’s a lot of “what.” Many of my Facebook friends are people that I’ve actually met from church, work, college, high school, etc., and thus represent a broad range of interests.
If I write about the 2009 National Academy of Sciences report on biometrics, all of my work friends will appreciate it, but some of my high school friends will be puzzled.
If I write about a particular Democratic congressional candidate in the state of Washington, my college friends will obviously enjoy it, and perhaps a few of my friends who happen to live in Portland Oregon may enjoy it, but my friend at church may be wondering why I’m referring to a woman who is being compared to Nancy Pelosi.
When I post original content on Facebook I can mitigate this somewhat – certain posts, for example, are only seen by people on my “MorphoTrak” list – but this doesn’t help with all of the feeds that automatically flow in. My Google readings are separated by categories, and my Facebook users are separated into groups, but right now there’s no easy way to specify that something from my “biometrics” feeds in Google Reader is ONLY shared with my “MorphoTrak” group on Facebook. This is obviously an issue that goes well beyond Facebook, and perhaps goes beyond techology…
I also think FB needs to adjust their average user profile, which will be tough for them, i.e. a bunch of geeks could struggle to write software for the bell curve of users. I do applaud their mostly don’t-care attitude about changing the UI, but groups and lists need one more iteration to be useful.
The irony of channels is they represent what FB was originally. It started as a closed network based on domain names, and I don’t think students at different colleges could friend each other. Not sure.
They’ve abandoned the closed nature for business reasons, but now, years later, it’s apparent that it was the best architecture for modeling people’s social groups, i.e. independent and segmented networks.
Going back to a similar approach of personal walled networks would appeal greatly to advertisers too, since it would require additional personal data.
Facepalm.
Twitter Comment
Facebook Flexes [link to post]
– Posted using Chat Catcher