Facebook’s members may have initially reacted with horror at the new homepage redesign which introduces a Twitter-like stream as the main interface. But Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg thinks that advertisers are going to love it. In a speech today at a digital advertising conference, and a subsequent blog post, she preached the many benefits of the stream and even had some data to back it up.
The average Facebook user has 120 “friends,” but not all friends are equal. Facebook engineers are able to group your friends by the way you communicate with them. There is reciprocal communication in which you both send messages back and forth to each other either privately or on each others’ Walls. There is direct communication, which is one-way and doesn’t always get a response. It is unrequited. And then there is the stream, the magical stream, where communication occurs simply by sharing things in a broadcast fashion, liking or commenting on those items, or even just clicking on them. This forms what Facebook calls your “active network.”
It turns out you communicate actively with a lot more people through your stream than directly. A Facebook member with 150 friends, for instance, engages in reciprocal conversation with only 5 people, in direct communication with 9 people, and in “stream communication” with 20 people.
Sanberg writes in her post:
When our Data Team measured active networks for users on Facebook, it found that, in any given month, users keep up with between 2 times and 4 times more people than through more traditional communication.
The other impact of the active network is that it leads to greater connectedness between the people in someone’s network.
The implication for advertisers is that the new design is going to be great for spreading their messages far and wide—reaching two to four times as many people! No doubt, that is true. Monitoring a stream of constant updates encourages communication because there is always something new to talk about and it has a feeling of immediacy. It does lower the barrier for interactions and makes it easier to connect with people one or two degrees sway from you, but who are brought to your attention because someone in your immediate circle just reacted to something they did or said online.
It is not only Facebook who has come to the realization that forcing the stream on people forces them to communicate more broadly. That is the whole appeal of Twitter. FriendFeed just did its redesign which turned the stream into a deluge, and even AOL has gotten the lifestreaming religion.
But whether or not this will lead to more opportunities for advertisers to reach consumers is still a big unknown.
wooo asmith
Google’s Sheryl bluffs.
if every person on earth could add a message every second to the stream,what would that do? What if each of those messages was a vote on something. Is that a universal conscience?
Its pretty obvious that most folks (assume knowledge worker) are still using the web for information. Dawn Foster’s notes published as Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content at SXSW show how lots of Information Technology Knowledge workers are using the new feeding and streaming tools. Most folks while already using these tools for more than information think they are still doing information activities. The folks are lucky to be the first generation of Knowledge Traders. The new wealth is going to be real knowledge. Information is too slow in the Information Economy. What is driving this New Information Economy is a need for efficiencies. Aggregation tools helped manage the Web 2.0 information drama very well but FriendFeed probably has a better chance at making Feeds mainstream than Google Reader. Feeds haven’t delivered to consumer but have succeeded with geeks who fortunately build most information systems today. This means there are feeds everywhere. Feeds are real time like activity streams feeds. Most people’s creative activities going forward will probably originate from a feed they were reading on a service like FriendFeed. Most people’s activities going forwards will begin and live forever on activity streams and feeds. This activities are the new work. This activities will probably include all the common activities that we see in organizations today. What happens after Feeds and Aggregation. Rapid Info-consumption and sharing? Rapid discovery and creativity. Rapid Real-time Solutions and Problems too
see http://now-web....d-activity.html
Deee…..eeep!
Wow, they are really trying to sell the new look to compete against Twitter. Despite their new data, that 2-4X as many people is no where near the capacity for spreading messages through Twitter. I am sure that the average Twitter user has a lot more than 150 followers. Moreover, because Facebook is a closed system those messages can only be shared with friends for the most part.
according to my simple calculation average Twitter user is updating 9 x more their status than average Facebook user.
3 reasons for this:
1. Facebook is lame, Twitter is cool
2. Twitter have much larger network of mobile applications
3. Facebook is lame, Twitter is cool
This kind of backs up what I thought: the Facebook redesign is a combination of the pursuit of advertising dollars (understandable) and really overthinking it (unfortunate). They assume that everyone’s going to keep up with Facebook even though the noise has gotten turned way up with the redesign, and it’s one of those cases where the company is obsessed with their own product and have lost touch with the reasons that non-power users have liked it.
I think the casual users who just enjoyed the ability to casually keeping up with friends are going to start dropping off. Just about everyone I know has at least started using it less, if not stopped entirely.
The noise is the point. When the story says advertisers might be able to reach 2-4x the number of people, what they’re saying is that when someone types the word “laptop” on their page/comment, 2-4x as many people will see it. Ads are keyed from this.
This seems simple enough, but you have to cut through the marketspeak quite a bit to eliminate all the benefits and to arrive at the concept of an ad being a search result based on the text of the page(s) you’re looking at.
Good point.
I think that Facebook will still be stuck ’cause people don’t consume advertising on social networks however you slice it.
Show me a contextual ad for a laptop on facebookand even if I want one, I’ll got to the net and go to a decent comparison engine.
Facebook is a great public utility in the same way that air is.
The noise is the point to *Facebook*, but not to the users. This is the overthinking part: assuming that users are going to stay with the site even if a user’s homepage gets way too busy with friends updates to read anymore, and that’s even before you ad in the annoyance of ads.
The fact that they removed a simple way to see only status updates show that they’re trying to key ads off of what they want users to see, rather than first finding out what users want and then keying ads off of that.
they’re trying to key ads off of what they want users to see, rather than first finding out what users want and then keying ads off of that.
Absolutely, but what’s the alternative? Surveys? Beacon?
I agree with that first paragraph f’sho.
I think it’s interesting to look on her graph that someone with 2X as many friends (500 vs. 250) has 2.5X as many reciprocal communication friends, 2.2X as many direct communication friends, and 2.1X as many stream communication friends. I would have expected the nonlinearity to break the other way, with people with lots of facebook friends having a bunch more stream communications than their less-friended peers and less of the more time-costly reciprocal/direct communications. However this data would suggest that as you increase your total number of friends, your circle of individuals you choose to have very personal and time-intensive communication relationships with grows faster than your friend list. An interesting behavioral question to be sure, and I wonder if this trend scales to people with 750, 1000, or 5000 friends. Perhaps there is a cut-off point somewhere for each of these communication modalities?
it seems your analysis is based on the amount of time required to participate in stream communication to be constant regardless of the number of friends.
So facebook is worth 20 billio or 15 billion? Facebook should go public. I would buy the stock.
Thing is, I never wanted to be part of the stream, I don’t want my comment shown to everyone. I use FB a lot less now and probably wouldn’t blink an eye if I had to delete it.
I have to agree with you. I have always been a huge fan of facebook but since this new layout I go there less and less. It feels too cluttered, too in your face. The previous layout was nice and relaxed. This one sucks.
Totally agree. That’s why I deleted my facebook account. Only once you delete it you realize how little value you get from facebook.
The real friends are on Gmail, and for everything else twitter is more convenient.
I like the live feeds format of Facebook, but things seem a little harder to access than earlier. For instance, it took me a while to figure out that I had to scroll down to see my friends’ b’days. Will see where Facebook ends up 2 years from now.
Btw, a friend send me this link – has brides for Mike Arrington: http://tinyurl.com/ctoyy6 Go vote and how much you love/hate him.
RT:@davewiner or @someone?
Can facebook compete against less by doing more?
On the net, small is beautiful.
they over thought it and ruined it. period. everyone i know hates it now. IF IT AINT FIXED, DON”T BREAK IT!!
Redesign is fine. What is interesting is the connection between the stream’s uptick in interaction and ad exposure. Is it a function of refresh on your screen or ads served up on unique interactions? Either way, in time the new design will weed out those that don’t like it and new users will not know the difference.
facebook and google are leading the economy.
Welcome. to. hell
Is a user less happy with a UI less likely to be receptive to advertisers message though?
Si!
mambo dogface to the banana patch
Hmmmm,
explain to me one more time why I want\need to be connected to a bunch of people I barely know and\or don’t know at all?
Newsflash folks, cyber friends are not real friends.
“When our Data Team measured active networks for users on Facebook, it found that, in any given month, users keep up with between 2 times and 4 times more people than through more traditional communication.”
Traditional communication like real life? Do they really think that they are promoting interaction among people? The way I see it, they are just displacing real life communication, and by making past contacts stick around forever, people will slow their ability to create new ones, or their level of interaction among their contacts won’t be as deep.
You can have good friends and you can have a lot of friends, but you can’t have a lot of good friends. No website is going to change that.
How can it not – we are learning more about each other (whether we want to or not). Additionally, we are learning how to communicate better – try verbally saying anything in under 140 characters.
“Active network”….great, another FB buzz word. Because I wasn’t about to hurl myself off the nearest tall structure the next time I heard them say “connect and share.”
That poor, poor horse…
I just posted a follow-up to this, where I think Facebook might (should) be going in terms of being the social media glue between corporations and customers: Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?.
It’s made it so useless I’ve barely even been on FB since the new design came out. I’m on twitter already, I don’t need another site like that.
I actively or passively or whatever-ly follow way fewer people now. In the old live stream, I watched almost all of my friends because I could edit how much information from Friend A or Application B I wanted to see, so if Friend A was a little too active or Application B was not interesting, I could tone them down. Now that it’s all or nothing, if someone’s annoying or I’m not interested enough in them to see huge posts about their every thought, they get deleted from my feed. I have about 20% of my friends showing up in my feed post-redesign versus 95% before. Suckers.
Ever saw this one on ___ Tall Meet
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It ’s where you have the opportunity dreaming about dating a
tall single and make it true!
Privacy issues seem to keep coming up over and over again with FB. It seems their goal is to use personal information to make cash. I predict, as long as they are on this path, that they will ultimately fail.
Can you name one company that has failed due to their reuse of personal information for financial gain?
Facebook’s eating itself by trying to chase Twitter. Totally incompatible with their previous incarnation. Spectacular crash ahead as they continue to alienate long term users (some in this thread) in their relentless search for pennies between couch cushions.
Since the previous incarnation no longer exists, I fail to see how incompatibility is an issue.
http://beta.friendfeed.com/ leaves Twitter and Facebook for dust “BattleStream” isn’t over yet by a long shot. Many more will emerge in 2009.
I wonder whether we are hereing all the truth and nothing but the truth from Facebook… have a look at this…
http://iconsens...g.blogspot.com/
Also they seem to be becoming client centric, a huge mistake. The stream is great for advertisers!!?
“Sandberg thinks that advertisers are going to love it” … this is worrying for any business, not least Facebook.
Facebook should ditch chasing Twitter and start ramping up their classmates features, which, to be honest are really really poor.
Facebook is for young, cool people and Twitter is for lame and old folks.
Interesting article…but, ultimately, online advertising is pointless if people choose to block ads. That simple. I don’t SEE any ads on facebook (well, I didn’t…I have since deleted my account), and I was able to totally block the new “highlights” column, which, if I understand correctly, will be where the ads would appear. I did this by using Firefox and a combination of addons: AdBlock Plus and Greasemonkey.
I honestly don’t see how these companies expect to make money, “stream” or no “stream”.
I always love techie pundits who think the average user is capable of the most complex manipulations with their pc. Newsflash: 99% of the world doesnt even know what Greasemonkey is!
Let alone how to use it.
From what I can see on my facebook account which is not full of techcrunch “know-it-alls”, the new feed has increased activity levels by my network. I dont see a single complaint on the feed either about the new layout.
Here is an interesting idea: maybe most of the people on this blog post who have never built or run a company before dont actually have all the answers, and they dont even have what it takes to move their lay-z-boy out of the recline position. In the end none of us know how the new friend feed will be received…we wait for the users to vote. But I can say this: Facebook just past 200million users and is growing by 1 million per day. They get more new users in a single month than twitter has on its entire network. Cool or not, Facebook is the single biggest social phenomenon in the history of the world, whether or not the peanut gallery on techcrunch delete their accounts or not. Its a mystery to me and many of us why people would share their thoughts and actions and totally mundane and boring minutiae with the world, but for some stupid reason like a bunch of gnu’s they do. I think the entire thing is the most asinine phenomenon I ever witnessed but there are 200 million and growing who say it isnt. So what the F$%& do any of us know?
I don’t think we “techies” should sell ourselves short. Every time I help a friend/family member/acquaintance with their PC I make sure to install FF and, at the very least, AdBlock Plus. I think if we all did that, the world (of the internet) would be a better place
great article.. small typo FreindFeed instead of friend feed..
Tired of the Tweet hype
who goves a flying fuck? look at how much money the social web has made for facebook. and also california for that matter. User generated content ensured second highest unemployment and most bankrupt state in the country.
social web = fail, from a revenue perspective
So now Facebook is responsible for the financial affairs of California?!?
Whatever you are smoking I want a bale!
Facebook is dead trying to compete with twitter. They need to stick to their old formula. I barely go on Facebook anymore, maybe once every few weeks or month, but I am on Twitter everyday, or rather all day!!
I can only wonder at the pearls of wisdom you have gleaned from your days on twitter. Bite sized chunks of irrelevant data finding you wherever you are and distracting you. Are you Paris Hilton or do you actually have a function in real life?
Facebook: “Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.”-Yoda
And thats why they wont change the layout. Its better for their business model.
Take your crazy pills
TS: Best comment ever.