Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
jeffdechambeau.com
jeffdechambeau.com
Well, the whole idea is to engage the user. They hang around a lot more when they engage. If you give somebody a list they will trivially take the head the second time onwards ( they will pop the stack, for any imperative folks out there ). That's because the very first time, you actually traverse the list. From then on, the head tells you if the list has mutated. So your brain will save you the cognitive load by simply taking the head of the list and then saying to you, look, there is no need to engage further since there hasn't been any destructive update since the last time you looked. So you will log off.
To prevent disengagement, all creative media ( magazines, newspapers, movies, comics, TV etc. ) will assault you on multiple fronts. So you don't get a list anymore. So Time magazine will have multiple columns on the same page, with each column corresponding to a different topic. One of those columns will have a picture, another an ad, the third an infographic, the fourth some text, and so on. I took a bunch of semesters of screenplay writing where this stuff is actually taught in some gory detail - how to keep the viewer hooked. Never be linear - the viewer is smart and will simply (and often correctly) guess where the movie is headed. So confuse the viewer by presenting information in a non-linear fashion deliberately, and occasionally throw interesting but unrelated bits of filler/second unit stock footage into the plot. Spice things up. I believe it was the british who came up with the more accurate term "sex it up". That's what facebok is doing. Frankly, it works very well - for the non-programmer types. Lets be clear, your life isn't all that interesting. If I just show you status updates in a list, you will be bored stiff after a point. But if I introduce a tiny element of stochastic displacement in your timeline, you will wonder, hey, where did this come from , when did I do that, etc. That'll keep you engaged, and that translates to a longer duration on the site => more $$
Newspapers work well with multiple columns because there's no inherent connecting features. Sure a page from the sports section will all have sports related items, but in general all the columns stand by themselves.
Facebook timeline is united by time. As in, what I say at the top of my timeline might be directly related to what I said before, and that might be directly related to what i said before that, and so on. So as humans, we want to read objects in the way they were chronologically presented. But on the new timeline, in order to do this, we have to zig zag from left to right, to left again. This isn't engaging the user just as making me do jumping jacks while I read isn't engaging -- yes it is spicing up my reading experience, but that just forces me to relearn something that is harder than what I was doing originally.
If the timeline was broken up into pieces, I could deal with that. Wall posts on the left, images and polls on the right, etc. Give my eyes some logical way to focus on only a part of my screen. But the exact middle of the screen on Facebook is a dividing line between left and right that presents almost identical information, and I have to form a structure from that.
Taking another example, in movies, it makes sense that the movie makers try to confuse and sex up a movie -- our brains want to be stimulated. But there's a difference between spicing the content of entertainment and spicing up the delivery method that content is offered -- imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy.
1) Lines are used to divide content and guide our eyes to what is important. In this case, we have to travel "across the line" to see the next piece of content which may be related, which breaks common notions.
2) Our mind usually focuses on the largest items on a page and then goes to the smaller details afterwards (Like how magazine article titles are always bigger than the text below it). In this case, after the top photo, my eyes move towards the bigger content boxes than the thin line in the middle.
EDIT: A third one!
3) If we focus on the line, the content to the left of the line becomes slower to read than the content to the right of the line. When we look to the left of the line, our eyes have to travel across the entire box to get to the start of the status. When our eyes travel to the right, the status starts a lot closer (due to text being written from left to right)
Here's an example:
Its a great day to be a programmer | I can't believe I got this job!
If you read this left to right, its fairly to read. But if you start in the middle at the line and want to read the left comment, your eyes have to go all the way to the left to get to the beginning, then come all the way back to where they were in the middle at the line. When you read the comment to the right, the text starts immediately.
But some TV shows (Burn Notice, for one) do this frequently. It works pretty well.
There's not really ever 2 concurrent plots happening simultaneously.
Try going to Fry's and finding a spot where they have 2 TVs next to each other that are showing different channels. Try just watching one of them: It's maddening. To me it's equivalent to animated ads on web pages--it just makes it impossible to concentrate.
However, the thing I find interesting is other people in the comments here have mentioned that they just look at the center and take in what's going on on both sides, which is exactly the same technique, and Facebook timelines are sparse in the same way that video is. It's easy to get a sense of what your Facebook friends are doing with a quick skim, without fully concentrating on any particular post. During this skim, your attention might be drawn to a specific post, but if it's not, you've absorbed a high-level overview and moved on, without having to read each post individually.
I think what you are describing works in certain mediums, but not well or at all in others.
However, both are wrong in trying to artificially catch user attention and time. It is like blackhat SEO, may work for a while, but it not sustainable. while but it is
I don't think that works for everyone. I can read an issue of The Economist -- which primarily has a clean, linear layout of two or three columns per page -- basically cover to cover. But take something garishly laid out like Esquire, and my brain and eyes start to revolt after a couple of pages.
It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily.
This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'
For that, you want to highlight a specific picture or event, but still have little anecdotes sprinkled here and there. They want you to go through the Timeline like you'd go through a photo album where you'd have a mix of the big events (graduation, marriage, births, etc.) with the little things, so that you can hear "oh, remember that one? When we went to Disneyland and you fell in the pool…", "you were so mad at him that day! Look at what you wrote on your wall…", etc.
Not having just a list makes it a bit more interesting to peruse. It's like going through a shoebox of photos and souvenirs, spread them out and you see some things, not others… I'm not saying they've nailed it, but it's a first version of it and it's an interesting experiment. It's hard to make an interesting photo album by hand, it's even harder to make something semi-automated.
As as side-note: The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
I find that interesting since I personally rarely see people's profiles or timelines.
Use the EXIF timestamp of when each photo was taken. Make a web page for each month, and group photos together by day to make it easy to skim through. Limit the number of photos shown on this page for any given day (put the rest on their own page) and you've automatically got variety. With those two simple organizational steps, viewers of the photo collection are set up for success in quickly finding photos that interest them, assuming there are some.
That's what your feed (i.e. the "main" page) is for, right?
The timeline is for when you want to look at just one person's activity... it's basically "WHERE user = 'xyz' ORDER BY entry_date DESC".
About the only thing I use FB now for is the feed, but then Twitter serves the same function w/ better control over who I want to follow.
He got women to smoke by calling them 'freedom torches' and orchestrating high society women to light cigarettes in a demonstration for suffrage.
He facilitated the modern retail industry by shifting American behavior from a 'need-based' consumer to a 'want-based' consumer.
There are billions of dollars being spent to increase the effectiveness of advertising and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the world's biggest advertiser used subtle tactics to achieve this aim.
Neuromarketing is a pretty standard practice now, I don't think any of this is controversial.
I would really, really appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we ever applied the term "conspiracy theory" to the common-sense assumption that a for-profit company's business decisions are motivated by (gasp, shock) profit.
Companies that become entirely about perpetuating their own existence, where the means of profiting becomes their purpose, seem to use nasty business practices and power to ruin competition rather than compete on product quality. They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice. I don't think this method is a good long term solution and from my perspective I don't think Facebook or Google are acting in this way (at least for now).
We justify advertising because so many of the products and companies we love are built on it, plain and simple. Advertising is "good" in the same sense that pollution is good: in a world without it, much of what we love wouldn't exist. The assumption that Google or Facebook ad revenue reflects value delivered to their users is extremely, extremely dubious, and I don't even see a prima facie case for it. When a rational actor spends money, that's good evidence that it is receiving value, but nobody would model a Facebook user making purchases as a rational actor. If they did, the ads would look rather different. So what basis do we have for saying that effective ads benefit users, except as a way of funding the service by extracting payment from users' attention budgets instead of from their bank accounts?
At one time, people loved seeing smokestacks belching smoke because that meant prosperity, jobs, and abundance. On HN, I think we feel the same way about ads. More effective ads on the web means more prosperity, more employment, and more products for us to enjoy.
Both Google and Facebook were born out of an interest to improve the world and solve a problem
I give credit to Google for having a corporate culture that reflects its founders, but in the long run, survival and profit are more fundamental in a corporation's hierarchy of needs. With Google we probably won't know exactly when it becomes just like AT&T or GM or any other large corporation; we'll recognize it sometime after the fact. Even in their current state, they're still a business with accountants, investors, and quarterly statements. The people who work there are ambitious and want to buy nice stuff; they get goals and reviews and promotions. All the elements that cause corporations to operate at a much lower moral level than the people they're made of are present. The corporate culture can only hold those forces back for so long.
As for Facebook, when did people start regarding them as a benevolent, well-intentioned company (distinct from their great product which really does improve the world?) I knew they were out to change the world and shape the future, but it seemed like improving the world happened as a side effect.
They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice.
First, you're describing the corporations that emerged victorious from previous great changes; don't underestimate how dominant that behavior can be. Someday, long after Google's "not evil" ethic is no longer an asset they have to lose, standard corporate tactics will be the best way for them to deliver shareholder value. And the shareholders will get their value. Second, it sounds like you're describing Facebook right now. I have Diaspora and Google+ accounts, but of course Facebook is the one I check all the time. Facebook can do almost anything to me and not lose me as a customer, for the simple reason that current social networks don't interoperate and therefore social networking accounts aren't portable from one provider to another in any meaningful way.
EDIT (abusing the edit function to reply): I agree with you that calling Facebook or any other company "malevolent" is incorrect. I think it's better to say that sometimes a company's interests are aligned with the interests of their users, and sometimes they aren't. I also agree that it looks like Google's and even Facebook's interests are aligned with their users' interests in many ways. However, that will change someday, and the very smart guys at Google and Facebook will start acting on that change of interest before we even recognize it.
Also, I really don't see it as them "tricking" us. They aren't doing anything deceitful or morally wrong. They're just doing their job, which is to deliver profitable ad clicks to the advertisers who pay them. We don't have to pretend that they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts (or that their advertising is good for us) in order to respect what they do and appreciate the service they provide.
As far as Google and Facebook I think they recognize that they're better off taking care of their users for long term success. I suppose you could argue this is only a temporary stance based on company culture, but I don't know if I'd agree with it.
Facebook takes a lot of heat and is often talked about on HN as this malevolent advertising company (privacy be damned), but to me this criticism always seemed overblown. I've always personally viewed them as actually trying to do what they say they're trying to accomplish. As far as the last point about Facebook being dominant, just because a company is dominant doesn't mean they're entirely about perpetuating their own existence. Facebook still rapidly makes changes and improves their platform, they also didn't do anything anti-competitive to try and destroy Google+ or Diaspora (I think Mark even donated to Diaspora).
This is all background to why I think the OP's article is unlikely. I think these companies build new features to keep their users happy and using their site, not design new features with the main purpose of secretly tricking them into more advertising. It isn't all about profit.
I can't imagine a universe in which they aren't placing at least some weight on the standard suite of "engagement" metrics. If that is the case, then they're seeking to increase the amount of time you spend on the site, the number of pages you view, the number of ads you see (and click), the frequency with which you scroll below the cut and so on.
Creating an interface that provides fast, easy access to the most relevant information means that most of your core metrics get worse. Facebook would have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally far-sighted for their interface to do anything but get worse. They would need a corporate culture that is either centralised and vision-led, or utterly indifferent to short-term measures of engagement and profitability. Zuckerberg is a smart man, but he's not a Steve Jobs or a Larry Page.
I don't think it takes that much intuition to realize that treating your users well and building something for them will be better in the long run.
While I tend to give the people at Facebook less credit, I do think there's a similar idealism at the core of the project. But I think they're fundamentally undermining human connection in many subtle ways that I've written about on my blog. Specifically, and more to the point, I think Timeline undermines the human intimacy of private sharing for the benefit of public performance.
http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and-perf...
Scrolling through a haphazard column system of photos of mishmash isn't that emotional to me. Going one by one through a persons Facebook album is more emotional to me because of the focus (one photo) and organization (I know which album I picked).
Looking at a photo makes me remember the context of the photo. However a status update is different. They're more frequent, they're less significant. They give context around the less important things.
For example, I remember the first time I looked at my timeline there was a status update that said something along the lines of "Oh man new doughnut at the Dunkin!" I wrote it a few years ago, and it was Completely pointless, and meaningless.. but then I remembered it, because later that day my mom was hit by a car. The entire events of that day flashed in my mind. Frankly that was pretty emotional for me.
Scrolling through 5 years worth of status updates gave you context for this (sortof), it was psychologically "far" away.
Being able to just click "2006", and easily see that stuff is creepy.
This is why I can't stand this timeline nonsense.
So...do I delete all of this stuff? I don't have a problem with these things being a part of my history, I just don't like them being presented in such a readily-available way...
But sometime before Timeline, Facebook made a change so that each post has an individual visibility to give users more control or whatever, and when I switched over to Timeline, all my old posts that weren't private automatically appeared on my timeline, and I can't easily change the visibility of all those old posts, that are now much more easily accessible.
I want the newer posts on my Timeline to be visible, so others can see the latest crap I shared with my friends, but I want the older posts to fade into obscurity, unless I actively bring them back again.
Do I want others to do that? Well, not so much. Timeline would have been a perfect product in my view if it only applied to your own profile.
If Facebook wanted me to pay 100% attention to the Status feed, they've succeeded. And by Status feed, I don't mean whatever that thing on the right frame is. Who reads that anyway?
What I despise is the lack of privacy, because if I tag a photo with a friend's name, all their friends can see it, regardless of my privacy settings which forces me to no longer tag my friends.
I basically have stopped using Facebook except for reading up on the newsfeed.
In case you missed it, to be clear - you are not the target audience.
So lucky for us, if Facebook were really basing their designs around what is more Poor Richard's Almanac than the Bible, we can build far more compelling experiences than Facebook using actual cutting-edge psychology - and I feel kinda lucky to get paid to do just that.
Why [Everyone Else] Is a Hypocrite -Kurzban
How The Mind Works -Pinker
The Stuff of Thought -Pinker
The Evolution of Human Sexuality -Symons
Where Mathematics Comes From -Lakoff & Nunez
Passions Within Reason -Frank
Culture of Honor -Nisbett & CohenThat said, Kahneman Tversky and Ariely dont deal with scene perception - which is what you would want to look into if you were interested in planting ads. They all started off as vision researchers then shifted into deeper cognitive work.
If you want some scene perception look into Dan Simons or Ron Rensink.
I lacked this language, but yes I think that's a fair reading of my position.
There's a broader argument that facebook really is providing a valuable service to us by making us aware of products and services that really will make our lives better. I'm unmoved by that claim, as I suspect most of us are.
That might not make sense to people with a simplistic view of what corporations are for, but I think it's true nonetheless.
Does anyone know what quote he's alluding to here? I recall skimming an article on it some time ago, but I can't actually find the original.
I've been thinking about this trend - and, quite frankly, being depressed by it - a lot recently.
And yeah, it is depressing. And I spend my time thinking about what they're doing... not sure if that is better or worse.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
I always chuckle at thoughts like this. If we want to rank on a scale of intellect it isn't clear that simply being a Google/Facebook/<insert tech company here> employee puts you in the 'smartest in the world' bucket.
There are PLENTY of people that aren't software engineers that are likely much smarter than anyone at any of these companies, unless we are to say that you can't be smart unless you are a software engineer, which seems silly.
It is in the same bucket with the clearly false 'we only hire the smartest people in the world' meme, also trumpeted by a lot of tech companies.
But "s/world/high tech/g" (and maybe "s/smartest/some of the smartest/g") and the broader point still stands, even without the hyperbole: lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Not maybe, definitely. Unless you are trying to make the claim that the set of the smartest people in tech is a proper subset of the employees of Google (or Google employees unioned with Facebook employees). I think lots and lots of very smart people that don't work for Google or Facebook would strongly disagree, and evidence is on their side.
>lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Yes, but lots and lots of very smart people are also doing <insert other kind of tech venture here>. The statement seems to pre-suppose that there is no or little value in the work they do and they should be working on more 'valuable' problems.
I personally hate advertising, but I don't look down on people that work at Google or Facebook if their job involves increasing click-through rates, nor do I believe having smart people focused on these kind of tasks is 'holding us back' in any meaningful way. To believe so implies that 'smart people' can excel/advance the state of the art for anything they work on, and thus they should focus on more 'important' things. If these smart people were attracted to doing these more important things that may be true, but then they would probably be doing them already. If they are attracted to what they are doing then they should continue, and do it as best they can. Further it ignores the idea that there are side-effects of their work that could be more valuable to the world as a whole (like new discoveries in machine learning, or algorithms, or even human psychology).
The fundamental currency that buys advancement is intelligence, creativity and passion for what you are doing. If you have 2 out of 3 you are unlikely to contribute meaningfully, and simply reassigning everyone at Google to work on say self-driving cars is unlikely to yield reliable, self-driving cars any faster, in fact it would likely cripple the effort.
Joking. But the Timeline view in the iOS app places all items in a single column.
That said, Facebook has basically become a place where I sync my tweets and other services like Instagram so that people that I know who don't use Twitter yet can see them.
It's a powerful solution to the problem of browsing all of a user's content over time, which was very difficult in the old profile. And it's a perfectly good reason for Facebook to try Timeline without ascribing ulterior motives.
I'm not sure what the author is referring to, but the ads on the side (regrettably IMO) look nothing like the organic content in the main Timeline columns. There isn't enough space to show more organic content on the side as there is next to the Newsfeed. Why does the OP think that the ads are "nearly identical" to organic content?
One example in the book is that even hard to read fonts can cause cognitive strain and make you judge the content of the text differently. I see that as being largely analogous.
However, I can't remember anything backing your assertion that System 2 is more susceptible to advertising. In fact, my reading is the opposite: System 1 cannot help but read words or look at images, and it is easily swayed by various advertising techniques. It would be System 2 that processes what's happening, realizes you are trying to be sold something that you probably don't want/need, then rejects it. Isn't it a lack of engagement of System 2 that leads people to instinctively click ads or follow spam links?
I assumed other people used facebook like me: To read what friends had posted, maybe occasionally post myself and respond to messages/events, nothing more.
The only timeline I have seen was one in which my friend put a picture of baby Jesus as his birth picture...
The new product continued to be sold and retained the name Coca-Cola (until 1992, when it was officially renamed Coca-Cola II), so the old product was named Coca-Cola Classic, also called Coke Classic, later just Coke and for a short period of time it was referred to by the public as Old Coke. Many who tasted the reintroduced formula were not convinced that the first batches really were the same formula that had supposedly been retired that spring. This is partially true because Coca-Cola Classic differed from the original formula, as all bottlers who hadn't already done so were using high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar to sweeten the drink
What Coca Cola actually ships from Atlanta is the syrup, unsweetened. The bottlers add water and sugar to this, and AFAIK [1], it is up to their discretion what type of sugar to use.
This is one of the reasons that Coke tastes different in different places - a can of Coke in Montreal is very different from one in Toronto.
I'd have fact-checked this, but for some reason, Wikipedia is down... :)
[1] Perhaps this is no longer the case, but it certainly was in 1989, when I "interned" at a Coke bottling facility in Harare, Zimbabwe for a week
Maybe the third-smartest. The smartest people in the world probably aren't working hard, period. The second-smartest people are working hard to build shit that sells itself.
I click on Google ads at least a couple times a month, because they tend to be relevant to what I'm looking for at the moment.