Facebook’s Battle Against Chaos
Michael Arrington
40 comments »
There’s a post on the Facebook blog today announcing a new group called “Facebook Sneak Preview” where they will show upcoming feature additions and changes before they are made live.
My bet is that this is their response to the user backlash and protests last year after after Facebook made some fairly dramatic changes to the site. With the new group, Facebook can ease users into the new stuff, and also get their feedback before it goes live. It’s an easy way to build consensus and dissolve criticism before it gains any steam.
The first batch of upcoming changes suggest Facebook is regrouping a bit, and redesigning things to help organize all of the new features they’ve added over the last year.
A simplified design. For those of the Facebook old guard, you’ve watched the number of features on the site grow. The new design will bring the focus back to the core elements, so the links you use the most often are easiest to find, while the others have new sensible homes. This will also help beginners understand how to get started. The Profile page will be a little sleeker, with your status rearranged, quick links under the profile picture and a mini-er Mini-Feed.
We’ve added a screenshot of how the new profile pages may look below. They are also simplifying message inboxes and networks.
Facebook’s drive to keep things neat and clean on the site is in stark contrast to MySpace’s chaos ridden widget hell. MySpace obviously does ok regardless. But I keep thinking that Facebook’s focus on order is very much in line with Google’s thinking on the matter. It may be time to start some new rumors about those two getting together, since Yahoo is obviously not going to pull the trigger on an acquisition. If Facebook does get acquired, it will be a larger deal than YouTube’s $1.65 billion.
who is choas? is this something really cool I don’t even know about?
lol - choas is an up can coming facebook killer
i have no idea what you two are going on about.
to be fair: mike spelled Chaos in the title as Choas (hence the joke) before he changed it correctly
choas is how you spelt chaos in the feed micheal. (everyone makes mistakes sometime
Interesting, this post doesn’t appear in my feeds at all. It seems to take 2 hours for posts here to show up in the feeds.
Anyone know why that is?
i have no idea what you guys are talking about.
Can’t wait for the big guy to chime in on this one - especially in light of those recent reports on ad-campaign success/failures?
I believe Choas, in the Spanish language, was a pirate in the east coast of Uruguay in the late 1700’s. He was most well known for leaving sailors stranded on small islands with cans of tuna and no can opener.
Any redesign will piss off a certain number of users who are used to the old layout- I personally still prefer the original design from a couple years back, before feeds and shares and all the Digg-competitor crap that mostly gets in the way.
New design looks great
Why would Google buy Facebook when they have the megapopular Orkut… Probably the same reason they bought Youtube when they already had Google Video. I guess if you can’t beat em, buy em.
Orkut is really ugly and has a terrible interface. Facebook is much nicer looking and user friendly.
None of my friends use Orkut and some of them don’t even know that it exists. If Google’s going to acquire Facebook, hurry up and buy it already!
How can you conclude so confidently that it’ll exceed the $1.65 that Google shelled out? If anything, I’d be pretty sure it’d get more than what News corp paid for myspace, but the $1.65B valuation greatly exceeds the valuation most analysts have placed on it. See valleywag’s recent leak on facebook advertiser performance too; i’m sure that isn’t very pleasing for prospects who are seriously considering shelling out a billion.
This kind of thing is what separates Facebook from the rest of the social networking sites out there. It has Zuckerberg stamped all over it.
to #15
jamie, what do you mean by ‘it has zuckerberg’ stamped all over it?
i can’t tell if you’re comming from a pro or con
you mean on the footer is has “a mark zuckerberg production”?
I mean, he has a very particular style of doing things that is somewhat different to what you usually see - this latest news is further testiment to that. He seems kind of Jobs-like in that he is more concerned about the product than the profit margin.
If simplicity of the site was a rationale to acquire a business, then google should first sell orkut to AOL and then buy facebook
Cool way to demo new designs/features. Atleast I like that facebook is open to user comments unlike myspace which does things on random.
Huh. 37 Signals’ blog had a Facebook post just the other day, about the contoversial changes they made. In particular, they thought the design needed to be simplified, which it looks like it’s going to be.
If Facebook goes to Google, it’ll be interesting to see if it goes for enough that Zuckerberg doesn’t look like a jerk for not taking the billion-dollar offer.
I completely agree, Facebook and Google seem a much better fit at this point. And how about Facebook coming after new hotshot Twitter with the prominent placement of Status…
Not a bad idea on their part. They really got burned a few months back - especially on Digg.
Anyone know what the ownership of facebook current stands at? Have they taken in much venture capital as of yet?
If Zuckerberg does sell - which I don’t think he wants to considering the rumours of $1billion of Yahoo! cash being turned down (does the sum matter after this point?) - expect it to be between $2b - $4b.
Facebook has a great future, and it’ll continue to grow at a ridiculous pace for quite sometime. It’s the usable social network, an antidote to the MySpace 404 - and it just keeps you coming back because of it. And unless you use Facebook with all your friends as I do, you just won’t get it.
Even $800m is a hard valution to justify for a ad-based site, but people actually do say things like “I just got a text, Mel’s status is ‘It’s complicated’. Not looking good for those two”. And “I’m going on Facebook to see what I’m doing tomorrow”. It’s a big part of some [middle-class graduates/students in big cities] people’s lives.
Being semi-protected by using uni email addresses, starts people off trusting the site. It’s a communication tool like chat, rather than a place for publishing like MySpace, so I don’t think there’s any real competition there. Lots of people use MySpace, DeviantArt, Facebook, YouTube as *they* find convenient, then cross-link their pages. Everything’s a click-apart on the web, you can pick&mix…
(Oh and Facebook’s design is incredible. Someone designed that as an application, not just a bunch of screens in Powerpoint. )
Personally, I think Facebook is going to be one of the first Web 2.0 IPOs…I think they’re playing to win in this sector and have the niche sites scrambling after them.
i F***ing love facebook
the majority of the people on facebook dont understand the Tech side of it, this is why they hate the new features.
heck, majority of the people on the internet dont understand the Tech side of it, which explains a lot…
“Why would Google buy Facebook when they have the megapopular Orkut”
because they want US users?
I really don’t understand why everyone things Facebook’s valuation is even close to $1bb, or why companies would be willing to shell out that amount. Yahoo has a history of making somewhat asinine acquisitions and then failing to ever get any ROI from the deal, so I don’t personally take their offer to mean much externally. Facebook makes less than $100mm a year, and though the market they have is (or, used to be) a specific and intruiguing demographic, there aren’t any tremoundous ways to monetize it - at least with the features the Facebook team focuses on.
YouTube has some extremely interesting revenue models that can be implemented in line with the content they distribute. I’m not convinced the same is true of Facebook. Most of Facebook’s ad content is peripheral and useless.
I’d love to see Facebook put in some sane default privacy settings:
- different levels between friend, family and contact (flickr got that right) instead of the stranger/network/friend/custom setting mess they have now
- don’t show last names if someone isn’t your friend
- prevent other people from tagging you in photos (I use a nickname rather than fullname on Facebook and I got the friggin idiot who started commenting on photos friends had posted with “hey, isn’t that real-name not nick-name?)
- prevent your Facebook profile from showing up in external search engines (they may do this, I know by default LinkedIn can show up)
A site redesign would be awesome as the privacy settings are all over the place and even if you know what you want to tweak it’s impossible to find half the time.
I absolutely cant see how a website with only 14 mln registered users (according to ‘Yahoo Fraternity’ docs) is sold at a higher valuation than YouTube.
Okay, Facebook’s usage patterns are more sensible to advertisers and the service at least manages to be profitable and the tech costs for user reach are lower. But the demographic of users is MUCH more narrow. And at the end of the day most big COs pay for the # of registered users
This is not looking to be the best venue for the feedback facebook is asking for, since there is no search or easy way to manage the topic list. Which is itself degenerating into a mess of suggestions and complaints not only about the new design. A lot of better options–maybe a built in wiki, like the patent office? — might exist here for facebook to get feedback, but it is still a pretty poor effort where I’m concerned. They have set up a threaded area which is not adequately moderated and is not well patrolled, opened it up to everyone, and then act poorly when it goes out of control with user suggestions. Just not a very well thought out venture, where I’m concerned. The thought is a little bit nice but not impressive given their track record.
I have a transcript of a talk with Zuckerberg at my school, where I asked him a question and he was not able to justify facebook’s valuations or explain its business model : (
I think this is a great way for Facebook to solicit feedback from its users. From a product development point of view they receive valuable input to design and feature proposals. From a PR point of view they don’t spring changes on users and have backlashes. I think Facebook is making some smart moves but I still don’t think they’re maximizing their potential. More about it at my blog http://foroobar.wordpress.com/.....-feedback/
At the bottom, 10 million users is weak in comparison with the potential size of the Web. The more so as on the Net one can have several identitities and thus expect 20 billion people living in the world!
In the same regard as keeping things clean, Facebook also resisted advertising much as Google did in the early days (they’ve obviously changed their minds a bit).
Whatever happened to rolling out features in Beta?
I mean, this is nothing new…Google Labs, alpha testers, etc…Facebook has taken 3 years to roll something out like this, and so they spin it as some new innovative concept, but its really just some screenshots and PR.