Facebook finally gets one right: understanding the latest changes
This week saw another slew of changes to Facebook, and as usual, it wasn’t long before the haters were out in full force, once again saying how the latest update ruined everything. I’ve agreed with them a few times in the past, but not this time around. As a software developer, there’s concern anytime changes are received negatively–it means either you missed the mark on what people wanted, you didn’t properly communicate how the changes work, or your implementation simply sucked. In this case, I think the most likely it’s a matter of lack of communication, although in Facebook’s defense, they explained it well on their blog and did a pretty good job of providing on-page popout explanations of the new features, and besides, the changes actually weren’t really that hard to grasp.
So, I’m left thinking that the complainers just don’t deal well with change. Facebook seems to be the new Comcast: everyone uses their products constantly but can’t stop complaining about them (in the case of Comcast, the complaints are fully justified). A recent poll showed the group of users most supportive of the changes are Information Technology workers; that would seem to indicate that the more comfortable you are with technology, the more likely you are to embrace these sorts of changes.
But in case it really is mainly a lack of communication on Facebook’s part, I’ll take a stab at explaining why the changes are a move in the right direction.
One of the long-standing problems with Facebook is that it doesn’t work well for people who don’t visit it frequently. If you go more than a day or two without checking Facebook, you’ll be missing a lot of potentially interesting posts about your friends. I suspect that about half of my Facebook friends are periodic users, checking in maybe a couple times a month and on their birthday when their email inbox gets filled with greetings from Facebook friends.
Previously, Facebook tried to address this by breaking the news feed into two streams: Top News and Most Recent. By default, users saw the Top News feed, so infrequent users would see the information Facebook determined was the most important. The problem is that a lot of people didn’t realize there was also a Most Recent view, and so missed a lot of posts. And the Most Recent view didn’t even show all the posts unless you changed an option (see Mysteries of the Facebook News Feed).
The latest round of changes work to solve these problems—the news feed is still broken into two streams, but they both show on the main page in a single section without any user involvement. The first section of the page shows the Top News (now “Top Stories”). This is followed by the Recent Stories section showing the latest posts, continually updated. Based on how often you visit, Facebook determines how much to show in the Top News section at the top. Users who visit multiple times a day may never see Top News because everything is already visible within the first few items in the Most Recent section.
That change is itself a big improvement since it eliminates the need to switch between two views. But Facebook made it even better by giving users the ability to help it decide which items it should consider “Top Stories”. The top left corner of each story contains a blue diamond that contains a dropdown menu that allows you to specify whether it should be considered a top story. Previously, Facebook did this magic all on its own based on which posts you commented on and which profiles you visited, but now you have more control over what’s important.
Facebook took the changes one step further by adding a third stream, the News Ticker, at the top right of the page. This is most useful for users who like to keep Facebook open. It is the “fastest” of the streams and shows everything your friends are doing in real time. I’ve heard a few users complain that this section is a privacy concern because it shows things that weren’t previously visible. That’s not really true—everything seen there would have been seen by anyone visiting your Wall—it just makes it more obvious. Users concerned about what shows up in the ticker should rethink their criteria for friend selection.
The changes make it easier to see the most important stories first while still providing easy access to everything for users who want to spend more time on Facebook.
For a long time, I’ve been hoping Facebook is working on the ultimate solution to information overload within our social news feed. Think of it as a sort of merging of the Facebook triple news feed with Google+ circles: it would allow us to separate our friends into subgroups. We could then use those groups for security (post only to “family” or “close friends”, for example) and also to prioritize our news feed (to show posts from “work friends” before “high school friends”, for example). So far, all the changes they’ve made seem to lead in this direction. In fact, Facebook already supports something similar to Google+ circles through friend lists; it’s just not very intuitive and most users don’t know about it.
Before you get too comfortable, it’s time to get ready for a lot more changes on the way (already rolling out to some users) including a completely reworked profile (the “timeline”) and music sharing.
What do you think of the latest round of changes to Facebook?
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