DISQUS

Joshua March · 1 year ago

A very well written and thought provoking article. However, I would point out that if you look at almost every online/tech-supported behaviour, you generally find that the characteristics of early-adopters and mainstream aren't really that different (although many early adopters like to think they are). The main difference is that early adopters are willing to use the new technologies before they're easy to use.

If you look at the internet, blogs, social networks - all of these tools and technologies were around for years before they went mainstream. What made them go mainstream? It wasn't a change in behaviour; it was a change in the technology which made these easy to do.

SO - yeah, currently many of the the behaviours regarding sharing of content etc is only carried out by early adopters - but that's just because they're ahead of the curve in the technology that allows them to do that, not because they're more prone to sharing than others, or somehow 'more serious' (as though the only serious people in the world are early tech adopters). Millions of people use Facebook, and they've just made it easy to share content - so could be a big step-change about to happen.

davemc500hats · 1 year ago

Eric -

nice piece, however, i don't think profile-bling "self-expression" and "river of news about me" news feed info are mutually exclusive content options / trends... just because MySpace emphasizes the former and Facebook emphasizes the latter, doesn't mean that they both aren't zeroing in on respective designs that combine both approaches.

in the future, i bet you'll see both sites/services combining elements of each... as will LinkedIn, Google, and other services as well (in varying degrees)

Eric Eldon · 1 year ago

Dave, they certainly aren't mutually exclusive. What I'm trying to say is that Facebook's old design was more of a blend of river+bling and the new design focuses so much on the river that it potentially cuts the majority of users off from the bling they love.

That's it. I'm starting a social network called MyFace and the main feature is going to be something called the Bling River.

David Adewumi · 1 year ago

I have a lot of college-aged friends that, even though the too participate in the 'bling river', very much find it annoying and un-navigable from a usability standpoint.

With all that money Fbook has, I'm sure they've spent quite a bit of time/money on usability testing & research to find out what people really want -- which I believe is just photos and news and interaction with friends -- at the end of the day, everything else is just icing (i.e. bling river).

Emily Williams · 1 year ago

Eric, I do agree with you to a certain extent. It's interesting - although not surprising, given the changes Facebook has made previous to this big overhaul - that they'd choose to go in the Twitter/status update direction rather than staying with the slightly more "permanent" profile that saw so much success. For me the point of Facebook is a profile I update once in a while, and I never update my Facebook status - for that I go to Twitter. And having just briefly looked at the new design, although I for one am happy not to have to scroll through a million apps on every profile, I do feel like hey, it's your profile, do what you want - and the new version allows for less customization of how your profile looks.

I don't think Twitter or Friendfeed will kill Facebook, nor do I think that by changing Facebook will kill the others. They're different, and I'd like them to stay that way!

gzino · 1 year ago

Aimed at advertisers/revenue as well. Used to be mostly one ad on left, now ads moved to right, and sometimes two ads being displayed. Brand new ad space on home page also - to the right of the news feed.

jasonkolb · 1 year ago

I suppose it depends on which demographic they're going after. There's a middle slice of users somewhere between Myspacer's and bloggers, perhaps they're trying to hit that sweet middle spot.

The only danger in that being that if that demographic upgrades to full-fledged blogs at some point that slice of users might dwindle. Or grow, hard to say :)

Alan Wolk · 1 year ago

Interesting take Eric.

I suspect a lot of the "Giggly vs Serious" split is an age think. FB started out as a social network for college kids, with high school kids right behind. As Danah Boyd's pointed out (and as I see anecdotally) it's close to the only social network used by college-bound middle and upper middle class high school kids who tend to like those giggle apps that seem aimed at 15 year olds.

We adults came on afterwards, when we discovered that the clean interface was actually fine for things like sharing links and self-promotion, provided you put the right privacy settings on certain photos.

And while Twitter is now mostly used to share links to sites like this, I often wonder if we'll soon see it (or the FB status update) used to link to PerezHilton or Us magazine.

Until then, you're right in thinking that FB's new redesign seems to favor the more adult audience. Whether that's what we in the ad industry call "NASCAR Blindness" (e.g. the thought pattern that says "No one I know does this, ergo no one does") or a conscious decision to go after that demo remains to be seen.

Perry · 1 year ago

Perhaps FB feels the need to focus on reinforcing their core identity. Twitter/FF are showing tremendous momentum (yes, on a small scale, as with any new product) building deep engagement on the fundamental status and sharing model. FB really achieved scale on the backs of the status and feed concept on top of the personal profile publishing (it's developers who added the bling).

My guess is they need to find a deeper level of daily/hourly involvement, which is being proven in TW/FF to win on engagement. The more usage you have, the more you can engage the bling and apps crowd - they will always follow the audience.

Perhaps it's more of a "first things first" approach, not an a vs. b.

my $0.02

Webconomist · 1 year ago

Maybe we're starting to see an evolution in Social Media usage? Could Segmenting in a serious way be taking place? Shalunov seems to have hit on something...Perhaps Facebook will be a more, uhm, conservative approach? Behavioural targeting anyone?

PanchoPepe · 1 year ago

Seriously... show of hands for those whose browsers would lock up while trying to get in touch with others in the "flat" single page layout?... it was great with a few of THEIR apps... but once the world came in and loaded ... with RAW code (it ain't even worth thinking of it as Betas, that's how bad some of these applets were) some pages? did anyone notice the amount of image fragments? and just plain indigestions with the Java Runtime and what not???

So I think they did the right thing; you want your stuff, put it where it belongs, if you're just stopping by to say hi, poke or otherwise write asinine comments on people's status-es, you do it and you're gone!... so you can go to your next victim... I mean, "friend"...

Ciao!!!

PanchoPepe · 1 year ago

Seriously... show of hands for those whose browsers would lock up while trying to get in touch with others in the "flat" single page layout?... it was great with a few of THEIR apps... but once the world came in and loaded ... with RAW code (it ain't even worth thinking of it as Betas, that's how bad some of these applets were) some pages? did anyone notice the amount of image fragments? and just plain indigestions with the Java Runtime and what not???

So I think they did the right thing; you want your stuff, put it where it belongs, if you're just stopping by to say hi, poke or otherwise write asinine comments on people's status-es, you do it and you're gone!... so you can go to your next victim... I mean, "friend"...

Ciao!!!

edhardy622 · 2 months ago

British law student sues Abercrombie-Fitch for disability discrimination.
http://www.abercrombieshop.us

Dare Obasanjo · 1 year ago

Does anybody in Silicon Valley use Facebook or do you people just regurgitate each others talking points? This is as clueful an analysis of Facebook's new changes as TechCrunch's "FriendFeedization of Facebook" garbage this morning.

Eric Eldon · 1 year ago

Dare, I've covered the redesign extensively over the last months, which you'll see if you click on any of the links I already included in the story. Here, I step back and examine some potential issues I see.

Since you don't like my angle, tell me why I'm wrong.

Also, I've been using Facebook since 2005.