The Connected Circuit

For all those of the web 2.0 information age, one of the biggest social networking sites was hit with a drastic redesign. Facebook, the all those not up to speed, is the most popular social networking site grown out of a college dorm room. What started as a way to rate who was hot and who was not on Harvard’s elitetest campus is now part of the lives of over 200 million unique users a month. The scale to which is has grown is phenomenal, when most other sites are gradually dying in popularity (well except twitter) facebook has come to the forefront of the web 2.0 social scene. 

A little history of facebook…

Facebook almost four years ago was limited to a small subset of colleges and universities in the US, to be able to register you needed to have an email address that reflected you were a student of one of the these. Luckily for me, my school was one of those. Literally overnight all my freshman cohorts on my floor were scrambling to find the best looking pictures of themselves, whether it be from a scan of their high school senior portrait or some semi-nice looking high school pic. I choose to go the more anonymous route of the now-extinct question mark. Registration was simple: enter some nice information about yourself, your gender, name, birthdate, sexual orientation and you’d be all set. It’s odd to think that the facebook in 2004 reflected more of your webpages back in the 90s than your twitter like pages of today. Fast forward two years to 2006 and facebook abruptly introduces one of the most controversial features to date, it’s news feed. Live and detailed information on all your friend’s updates, what they’ve removed, what they added, if they’re online, the works. It caused the biggest up uproar in facebook history. Many of people’s concerns were because of the lack of privacy controls and complete lack of informing it’s users of a sudden and mass change of user interaction. My memory of the event was just working away at my work study job at 8 AM, logging into facebook and saying to myself… “hmmm that’s different”. To be perfectly honest, I really liked the implementation of the news feeds. I wasn’t an avid user of facebook like some of my other peers at the time, but I would check it maybe once a day, I didn’t have a picture for my profile for a solid six months, never made any profile changes or additions and it showed.

Fast forward again to 2009 and here we are at the brink of another drastic design change, gone are the the live feed and tabbed views of information, but just a set of defined filters and an interface very much akin to that other social networking darling twitter. Complete with the analagous “What’s on your mind?” and a sole box to let all your friends know, very much like twitter’s now imfamous “What are you doing?”. The backlash erupted in many users, although notified for weeks of the impending redesign right as they visited the site, hating the new design. With the latest poll showing 94% of voters saying nay to the new design (94% of less than half a percent of facebook’s user base that is) facebook was poised to not listen again, with a few being facebook’s own employees . Being as reponsive as it was, facebook listened to many of it’s users cries and modifications were a foot, less than two weeks later, the designs were changed and more filtering mechanisms were put in place and things have quieted significantly.

So why the quiet all of a sudden, why no new polls and petitions for reversions of the site? Well being the cynic that I am I think it was all a plan to garner much news and bring facebook back to relevance to all it’s users that have been lost to twitter. Twitter has gained quickly gained popularity and relevance into the eyes of the mainstream, even surpasing the now gaudy and superficial digg.com . It’s crazy how fast twitter has grown over the past three months. Something so simple and accessible as letting all your friends know that your going to the bathroom or sharing your thought on something you saw online in 140 characters or less is mind boggling to me. I guess in all that simplicity lies a wealth of depth and with twitter’s extremely open API, anyone has access to what their mind limits them to.

So where is facebook headed next? I’m pretty sure facebook will steal more features to the growing, yet small userbase of friendfeed and become a true life streaming application. Although friendfeed has been very innovative in features and with its recent launch of their beta, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to agree with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and say it is one of the coolest applications that will go nowhere. Facebook runs very loyal bounds, I’ve found that users of facebook are more interested in connecting with people they’ve met in real life rather than meeting people in the online world. It’s very much a traditional way for people to interact covered up in the shinyness that is technology. Friendfeed on the other hand will stay very niche and only cater to the techies. Twitter has some hope in it’s simplicity, but friendfeed is just too overwhelming for new users. It’s essentially a silo of information coming at you hard and fast and only quick minds need apply.

Read more here on facebook redesigning efforts of people in the industry.

--written by Peter To--