Oh, no. Here we go again. The world’s largest disaster of a PHP site has had a new new facelift, and its nose has fallen off. Where’s the surgical mask?
The thing is that Facebook’s primarily a site that people to go in order to keep up with what people they actually know are doing. It’s an adjunct to real life. It’s complements the relationships people have with each other in the physical world by making it easy to keep in contact and know what one’s friends are doing without being intrusive. Imagine texting hundreds of friends just to see if one or two of them wanted to go to the beach on a weekend. Ugh.
The new new Facebook is in danger of losing that niche by dint of the fact that it’s trying to be (dare I suggest it?) too much like MySpace or Twitter. Don’t get me wrong – MySpace and Twitter are great. (Okay, well, MySpace is a disaster, but Twitter rocks.) The thing it, though: they’re not really for keeping in touch with existing friends; they’re for making new ones online [insert obligatory, snide MySpace/child molester remark here :p], and for general awareness of what’s going on in the lives of people we admire or who are important to us, but whom we don’t necessarily know. For example, Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) has around 300,000 followers, all of whom have at least a passing interest in what he’s up to, but it’d be ridiculous to accuse him of having 300,000 friends.
Let’s not even get started on Facebook’s developer API, design philosophy or choice of platform. The developer API is a pain – and belive me, I know. I’ve written a couple of apps for it as a learning experience and, while it is usable, it’s far from well-designed. Put it this way: I’d fire anyone who worked for me if they’d developed it. The choice of platform is ridiculous – who writes such a massive application in PHP? Ugh. Sorry, fellas – that’s just plain dumb.
Let’s just accept, I suggest, that Facebook isn’t popular based on its technical merits. So what makes it popular? Metcalfe’s law (paraphrased) says that the value of any telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. That is, that a network becomes more valuable the more people use it. Given Facebook’s technical merits, then, it’s not much of a stretch to understand that almost the entire value of Facebook is dependent on its user count and the interactions between them.
Here’s a hint, then, fellas:
1. Make your site useful.
2. Don’t ever let the application spammers loose again. You escaped by the skin of your teeth last time, but you were facing a mass user exodus during the “Invite 20 friends” wars.
3. Put your bloody feedback links back. It’s ridiculous that people tweet and blog their dissatisfaction with Facebook more than they tell you directly.
Screw it up much more, and the already-circling debt collectors will come around and take away and sell the gates to the ranch.
Honestly…
0 Responses to “The “New” New Facebook”