Facebook, Changes, Attitude, & Google+
There have been some fairly significant changes to the overall appearance of the primary interface that users of the number one social media site, Facebook, see that rolled out to most users this past week sometime. I personally have very little of an opinion about it, but more about that later. My biggest issue is the general lack of concern about the users (note, I did not say customers) that Facebook seems to have shown in this and similar roll-outs of changes in the past. Kind of reminds of some other, earlier social media sites seemed to do – sites that I might also note are almost non-existent due to Facebook. Facebook does have competition these days though and that brings us to Tech Friday…
Okay, let me start by saying that I really do not have much an opinion on this change either way. Out of curiosity I asked by Facebook friends about opinions and of course read some before that. The two biggest issues I heard was that things were crowded and the overall abrupt change without any buy in and especially an option to roll it back.
Of the former complaint, I can see it, but I really do not mind all that much. I routinely squash up my screen with ten or more windows open, overlapping, and usually set to tiny font sizes. I don’t really care for the fact that I do not have an option to see top stories or just the recent feed stream, but that is still there I just have to scroll down. By the way, my complaint with the top stories is the AI logic is just not strong enough there. It is the same thing with why SEO does not do well, it does not pick up the irony and such and just does not really give me the stories that I would always consider in my top picks.
As for the ability to roll back these kind of changes I do not understand why that is not included. I mean, even Microsoft has learned that lesson with things like classic mode, even on the things like control panels for typical administrator tools. It would really go along way toward to by my rough count on some complaint ‘like’ me fan pages the almost fifty million users that are not happy.
Which really brings me to my biggest observation. Facebook does not have to do anything for the seven hundred fifty million (or more) users that it has currently. Not a thing. It is after a free service and I recognize that. However, I wonder how many of those users are actually active. And just how much negative impact would it have if a couple hundred million users all the sudden did change to a different platform like Google+? I do not think Facebook is completely that unconnected to the users. However, I did notice something, especially from third-party folks that stand a lot to potentially lose if a enough folks stopped Facebooking. They were all up in various defense of Facebook in every kind of direction – even to and especially to the point of saying to stop complaining and just “live with it, since Facebook just does not care about users.” I find that kind of thing from third-party vendors associated with Facebook more disturbing.
Two statements on this situation. First is the fact that I think Facebook is learning about the big changes. A big change was announced just today that will be coming the future called Timeline. Interestingly, it got some hype before the announcement and a lot of folks were expecting it roll into their Facebook today. Reality is, as was announced, it will be rolled out over a two to three-month period beginning sometime soon. Second, just as I have indicated in the past with the browser wars, I think the competition in the social media arena, especially coming from Google+ is going to lead to good things on all sides, especially for the end users. We are already seeing some things that are very in innovative in Google+ starting to show up in some form in Facebook. Just wait until Desponia gets rolling in a major way.
** – Image from perversaperspectiva.wordpress.com.
