The dude in the video has sure aged and accomplished an impressive amount in Facebook's 7 year history.
I really miss searching through profiles. I made a lot of friends randomly that way at my school. I'd click on a band name, a movie, a person or anything, find all the people that liked that band, find out a person was really awesome, hang out with them, etc... Then you could find people at other schools, people that went to your high school, etc... which was also really nice because I went to 8 different schools over 5 years and lost touch with a lot of people. I became better friends with people who used to be just acquaintances. I probably added 2/3 of my friends now on facebook within
Myspace didn't have anything close to that, just name search, and facebook has sort of regressed into that largely in the name of privacy I'm sure.
That's because within the first couple years they figured out that over 90% of their users were primarily using it to connect with people they already knew. (And these were the folks who were both early adopters and college students.)
Also, if you design a social network around meeting new people then that network will cap out relatively quickly and die due to 'triadic implosion'. This is where person A is friends with person B and C. Once person B meets person C, the open triad becomes a closed triad. I forget the exact percent, but once the closed triads are more than a certain percentage the entire social network dies. However, networks that are designed to connect you with your existing friends don't run into this problem.
Also, designing the social network around your existing friends is more conducive to generating lots of new content cheaply and often automatically by using exterior behavioral residue, which is essentially what this new update is all about. Originally Facebook was designed around the existing social science combined with Zuckerberg's intuition, though at this point Facebook is mostly designed around its own proprietary social science that has been created for internal use. In the short run they are maxing out their stickiness before the IPO, though in the long run it wouldn't surprise me if they ultimately undermine their original appeal by straying too far from the basics.
I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting a research paper that I'm familiar with. A common measure of network structure is the clustering coefficient, which is the ratio of triads to all possible triads. In real networks, the average clustering coefficient is generally orders of magnitude less than 1%.
Besides, the network is continually growing, and people generally continually meet new people. It's highly unlikely that the FB network is going to stagnate because "everyone already knows each other". At least not for another decade...
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1150402.1150412&coll=&...
Unfortunately I no longer have a copy of it on my computer to check. This was my understanding though from the last time I looked at it:
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/triadic_imp...
As a long-time user, I enjoyed Zuck's history of and return to the profile as a point of creative focus. In the early days, it was the only space to "perform identitively" (in danah boyd's phrasing), so we all sweated over what interests and favorite music to list. Much of that got lost in the switch to the News Feed.
That said, I think many of us will be disturbed to rediscover how much data Facebook has on us--pictures of long-forgotten parties, etc.
The high-production value of video at the top reminded me of an apple advert, with beautiful photography and that emotionally charged soundtrack (though the playback quality was a bit off for me?) And then as you scroll down it highlights the different sections in quite an elegant way.
One flaw I saw is that the layout is fixed with and centered, and presumably fixed to be the same width as the actual ui, but they've got some tips in the side bar on the right, which you don't see unless your monitor is wide enough. My window was 1200+ pixels wide and the comments on the side were clipped.
"showed a cool movie of a guy's entire life on Facebook's Timeline, but I was nervous they would go to the death part." -Kara Swisher