Why Facebook sucks. Someone really needs to figure out the algorithm that controls the news feed on Facebook—you know, the page that pops up when you log in, showing you all the latest stuff happening to your friends. First, the timestamps are ludicrously random—I’ve rarely seen an item listed with the proper time. Status updates are especially stupid, in that if you look at the list of status updates you’ll see pretty much exactly how long ago your friends last changed their status, but if you pop back to the front page those same updates will be assigned arbitrary times for no apparent reason.
The ability to tune out certain types of news items is woefully lacking; maybe my friends are all boring, but one day after turning down “joined group” items to the lowest level, my page was nearly full of group updates. Listen, Facebook, if my friends are really that inane, I’d really rather you just give me a blank page, thanks. There are also some items you can’t turn off, like gifts—possibly the most useless application ever conceived. “omg you bought this 64×64 GIF images JUST FOR ME? omg ur awsum!” No, I don’t want to join your Final Four pool. No, I don’t care about some random gurl who sent you toilet paper becuz thats soooooooo funny.
And finally, Facebook’s habit of aggregating similar items has the unintended effect of spamming your page with the same information over and over. One of my friends changed her profile picture. Well, hurray for her—do I really need to see this information twice? Sometimes Facebook will do a “state of the social network” news item where it helpfully posts that “32 of your friends have changed their profile picture.” Facebook must know how frequently people hit their newsfeed pages; they can’t honestly think that we need to be reminded of people who changed their profile photo a week ago. Unless it’s all a cynical ploy based on traffic analysis that suggests “if we mention more people on the front page, people will think they’re more in touch with their friends!”
It’s been apparent to me for a while now that we need a smarter Facebook. My previous foray into social networking came via Vox, which isn’t nearly as useful as Facebook is. But both services, and many more I’m sure, suffer from the same issues, of which the chaotic front page is only one aspect. The biggest problem is you still can’t put people into groups and manage privacy settings on a group-by-group basis (Facebook’s “networks” feature is a poor analogue and less useful as the number of networks increases). IM managed to get this sort of thing right nearly a decade ago; would this sort of friend management really be such an additional burden on the databases?
Why Facebook doesn’t suck. Kottke on Facebook and why it’s too much like bad old AOL. Kottke’s a good guy who knows his stuff, so he may have already thought of this line of reasoning and dismissed it. But I think he’s missed the boat on why Facebook is popular. He throws around phrases like “intranet for your friends” and “walled garden” as if those are all bad things. But in fact it’s that walled-garden mentality that first attracted people to Facebook. The original target audience, college students, aren’t naive; we grew up alongside the internet, and heard the horror stories of girls whose striptease videos are now online thanks to a spurned ex, or creepy pedophiles chatting up teens in IRC, or the lengths to which marketers will go to to get their hands on your address. We’ve seen the rise of spam, the RIAA suing families into oblivion and people getting fired for blogging.
As the interstitial internet generation—the one that bridges the gap between those who still live, by and large, in a pre-internet mindset, and the generation who’s adopted MySpace in droves and can’t imagine a time before the internet—we’ve done a lot of thinking about how much information sharing is too much information sharing. Privacy is still important, even as we learn the joys of forming relationships and sharing gossip online. We like the idea of our lives being an open book, but only to the group of people that we trust, and almost never to corporate interests. It’s in that climate that Facebook was born—a social networking site that built into the system as many safeguards and layers of protection as possible to make sure its users felt safe enough to share, and with only those people they wanted to share with.
The initial launch of Facebook only included a couple of universities and colleges, and even talking across college networks was hard—you basically had to know who you were looking for, and your target had to want to be found by people outside his or her network. Those basic safeguards still exist, in fact. Part of the initial appeal of Facebook was its limited scope; not just anyone could get in, only other college students just like you. Even as Facebook expanded, it still remained a students-only place, where you needed to prove your affiliation before you’d be let in. In other words, Facebook was a walled garden. But unlike AOL, which was built as a closed system because they didn’t really know any better at the time, Facebook was built as a closed system partially on purpose.
Every expansion of Facebook since the early days has caused throngs of members to throw up groups protesting the latest change. Facebook open to just anyone? No! Facebook introduces mini-feeds? Stop the snooping! Someone creates an application that lets people see who’s visited their profile? Absolutely not! And so on and so forth. It should be crystal clear by now that a significant portion of the Facebook community actually prefers the closed nature of the network. The idea that info inside Facebook should be freely available outside Facebook would destroy one of the big reasons why people flock to Facebook, even now that basically anyone can join.
Should Kottke’s vision of an open platform that replaces Facebook while maintaining its many privacy features come to fruition, then sure, I’d switch. I’d much rather a bunch of small, loosely connected services have access to bits of my info than Facebook having access to all of my info. Until that day comes, a lot of people are going to continue to stick with Facebook, not just because it’s easier to use but because of the perception that on Facebook, you control who knows your secrets and who doesn’t.
