Facebook Takes The Fast Lane To Boring

The comments that've been posted here are proof of that. People talking about bloated news feeds, damaged apps, or (my favorite) how "boring" the idea of having friends is... this is all completely missing the point. Facebook is for people that have friends, and want to interact with them when they're supposed to be doing something else. And any attempt to make it into anything else will fail.

I can testify to this, seeing as I'm Facebook's target customer. Just graduated high school; I'm not extremely active comparatively but I have some semblance of a social life. Facebook's systems are geared towards me. When I get back from a prom, I can see photos of me and other people, and if I don't know the other people we can talk over the pictures. If a friend wants to let something out that he doesn't feel comfortable saying out loud, he writes a note about it. Event inviting - good way of getting people to meet in person. Shared items is the least-used feature on Facebook, and it's because that's the one feature that gets used more by nerds than by normal people.

But TechCrunch and Scoble saw Facebook growing, they found that it was well-designed - and in terms of small comfort features, Facebook blows every other site out of the water - and they assumed that Facebook was meant for them. Well, it wasn't. That's what makes it such a good site. Look at Virb, which feature-wise is much more in tune with the tech world. There's a reason that you don't see Virb brought up in comparison to Facebook. It's because it's designed for critics, not the masses.

And - let's talk about apps a moment - application designers really don't have a chance. I think Facebook knows this, too. Their platform isn't meant to create value for the users so much as it is a means to weaken other casual sites. Top Friends drew most of my MySpace-addled school towards Facebook. Compare Friends took away the few Orkut users we had. These are not productive. Not like Flixster is supposed to be, or Box.net, or even Flickr or Digg or Last.fm. The products that add actual value to the service are the ones doomed to fail. Because there's no market for productivity on Facebook. Facebook is where large networks go to die.

Two years ago, when I wrote a bit for AllFacebook and used Facebook ravenously (see: a new feed's worth of actions per day), I noticed a trend in people types. Among the low-end social people, the people with just an illusion of a social life, there was tremendous activity. These were people who checked things every half hour. Among the majority of the users, though, there was either no activity every day, or there was a status update activated via cell. People were not using Facebook to manage their lives, they were using it as a sort of back-up. An in-between. These were the people who would update their top friends once every three days, which I would sneer at. "What a waste of time," I thought, as I continued to productively check every 30 minutes and respond to every message with essays (I like writing, whether for productive use or no). Really, though, Facebook wasn't a time sink for those people. It was a quick way to stay amused. These people, these casual users who go on for Chat and status and little else, these people are the main market of Facebook.

The people who don't care about efficient profiles. The people who will be as amateurish as they want because they know only their friends can see in. These are the people Facebook knows it needs. Why else would it take so long to fix up the profiles? It knows that most people don't WANT efficiency in profiles, that when they're going on they're going on to waste a little time. But it's not meant to be a constant thing, either. Assuming Facebook CAN be productive, that's the fault. That's the mistake. No all-in-one site is meant to be productive. That's not how you achieve productivity. Facebook is a pit, and that's fine and healthy, as long as you KNOW it's a pit before you start.

A few weeks ago I removed all my friends but about 60 from the site, cleared my profile, removed all my apps (including Photo and Shared Items), and it gives me a much clearer picture of how it works from the average user's perspective. I go on at most two times a day, and that's because a few people are planning a meet-up and we're using Facebook to co-ordinate. When I actually do things with friends, we call each other or just drive to each other's houses. We don't need Facebook for that. Facebook becomes just a point for those few times you want to plan things way in advance, or when you just need to vent to friends. It becomes useful in a way. Not productive, but useful. And what makes it useful are the things Facebook built itself: photos, events, notes. Any applications beyond that are only good for amusement's sake. The top app developers get that.

The people going to this conference, looking at the new technology, those are the people that are going to lose. Because Facebook's not doing this to change the tech world. They don't want to be Microsoft. They want to be MySpace: a better MySpace, but a MySpace nonetheless. A pause in the middle of the day. All this talk about integration with other services, opening up charges for applications: forget that. Users don't care. The vocal users, they do. But that's about .001% of all the users, IF that. And the rest of the world isn't listening to them at all.

I can see why the author of the article would be a little let down compared to last year's platform launch, but this is still a pretty solid release. heck, is it even necessarily a good thing for the site to drastically remake itself every year?

If nothing else, anyways, a tightening of the excesses of some applications goes a long way towards convincing me to go back to facebook.