Old Facebook was charming. It was simple. It did a job nothing else had done. I
liked the odd tidbit updates from friends and colleagues, the new form of
autobiography, the passionate grouping of wing nuts and dilettantes alike.
Mostly, I liked that it was, in its own words, “a social utility.” It was
helpful, and it performed.
It also didn’t make money, and efforts to do
so (like the much ballyhooed and
booed Beacon bombshell) fell short. Along came
Microsoft with a huge infusion of cash and, it seems, clunky PC-world
inefficiency and “more is better” ideology. Who has better models of things we
don’t need than the goons in Redmond? (See all editions of Word post 1995; see
Vista; see increasing conversions to Apple).
Why do we have it?
Because the new (dys)functionality creates new real estate to sell. The New
Facebook takes and breaks what was simple, elegant and useful and replaces it
with a variety of tabs that hide, disassemble and confuse the carefully crafted
narratives and preferences that millions and millions of users chose with
purpose. There is about 400 percent more advertising space on the New
Facebook. Um, yay? Did we want that?
Can Facebook track user experience
in a more precise
way now? Yes. Can they gather more precise data? Yes. Can
they target more precise ads? Yes. That would be awesome, if they wanted to
become the next
AOL, stellar example of Web savvy it is.
Can they keep a
user base now that they have erased the utilitarian efficiency and quaintness of
Facebook? I doubt
it. This suggests very bad things for other “Web 2.0”
efforts. The key to success will not be changing the product to get the sale,
but to get the sale with the product people want. Facebook has just forced a
massive bait and switch on its user base. We signed up for one thing; now we
get another. It is a very good thing Facebook doesn’t charge for its
“utility.”
If you think that these types of design changes don’t have a
big impact on businesses, growth or valuation, please go take a peek at
Google’s
unadulterated, unchanged, utilitarian interface. Then click on over to the mess
that is now
Yahoo — in terms of design, business and board in-fighting. Or, see
the fairly high and stable prices on
Macs, compared to the falling prices at
Dell. Simplicity matters. The marketplace despises confusion, and Facebook has
dealt up a big plate of it.
Good luck, Facebook. I’d post a message
there if it were still easy to do so.
