4:17 PM
US A MA
“The social media network annoys its users, again, with a confusing revamp. There must be an agenda here, somewhere”
Like, around 750 million users of Facebook, I logged on to the world’s biggest social media network this morning and was immediately annoyed. Facebook had changed its user interface, again. Gone was the “Most Recent” button, which allowed users to see what their friends have posted in a simple, straightforward, and chronological order. Now Facebook is indulging, again, in outright effrontery: employing its own secret algorithmic sauce to spice up what it considered to be the most important “top stories,” while plattering it with other recent posts quite down on the page.
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Facebook has also added a “Ticker” at the top right hand side of the page, which provides a real-time Twitter-like stream of status updates from all my friends. When I first checked it, it was packed with complaints about the new interface change. Judging solely from comments of my friends, people don’t want Facebook deciding for them what’s most important, Facebook’s suggestions are wrong, irrelevant and insulting, and why oh why oh why can’t Facebook leave a single good thing alone?
Inertia is preferred and yes, people hate change. And, they’re switching to Google+ (which conveniently opens its doors to the general public today), or Twitter, or giving up on the Internet altogether.
When you also disgruntle along with nearly a billion people, it becomes a fairly big news right away: The biggest tech news sites brimmes with the story within seconds. Moments after I encountered the interface change, TechCrunch offered the almost instantaneously obsolete “How to Go Back to the Previous Facebook Interface (While You Still Can)” while Gizmodo ambitiously promised “Everything You Need to Know About the New Facebook Update.”
Experienced users of Facebook nearly collapsed- thanks to the overwhelming déjà vu. More than any other consumer-engaged company, Facebook routinely makes major tweaks to its user interface in ways that surprise and wards its users away. But so far, strangely, the users always manage to get over it. The pattern is set in stone. First there’s a big uproar, then a flurry of suggested workarounds that will either revert the changes back to the idyllic past or otherwise nullify the most outrageous new abuses of our sensibilities. Some of these workarounds work, and some don’t. Occasionally Facebook rolls back some particularly egregious privacy violation. But usually, the uproar soon subsides. We return to our gossip, snark and embarrassing family photos. And Facebook continues its inexorable growth.
We don’t leave the ‘social media giant’ for a very simple reason: The golden fetters of the network effect. We’re locked in by the comprehensiveness of the Facebook universe. We might look longingly at Google+, but is that where the birth of a friend’s newborn gets announced? Is that where your sister posts the picture of a lewd nun?
The dynamics are beyond irritating: The fact that Facebook user’s complaints never amount to anything but empowering Facebook in its behavior.
But amidst all of our grumbling, we should probably be paying closer attention to the WH questions in this situation. Because Facebook is clearly up to something. On the one hand, it seems like Facebook is intent on imitating or co-opting everything its competitors are up to. The recent introduction of Friends Lists and the Subscribe button enable far more granular control of what you see in your News feed (and what your friends see from you). That seems like a clear mockery of Google+. The Ticker, as already mentioned, also reeks of Twitter.
And there’s clearly more of the same (that is to say, constant change) coming down the pike. The trade press is rife with rumors of even more significant changes to Facebook that could be rolled out as soon as Thursday at Facebook’s f8 developer conference. Misty details indicate that Facebook wants to become the platform where you consume and purchase all kinds of media — music, video, et cetera.
And that may offer a hint as to what Facebook is trying to achieve with its emphasis on deciding for you what you see when you log in. If Top Stories are determined by popularity — how many comments or “likes” they get from your friends, how much they’re shared — then anything viral will quickly move up the rankings. Facebook, in effect, will broadcaste those Top Stories to you. If the goal is to encourage on-site e-commerce, prominently flaunting what users are excited about might be one way to achieve that.
I’m sure we’ll all be annoyed when these changes are made. And at some point, maybe we’ll be so annoyed that we may really leave. Nothing lasts forever on the Internet — the social media universe is replete with the corpses of once-mighty networks that failed to innovate or evolve as fast as new competitors.
Which, of course, is another reason why Facebook can never stand still? To survive, it must annoy.
