Another blog post, another slightly fanboy-esque clipping from the twitter stream of Tim O’Reilly from me, however he’s nailed it again.
I’ve spent a few days being quite quietly frustrated about the new Facebook design. In my opinion it took a really nice concept of their own invention, the activity stream, and tried to munge that together in a design entirely of another site’s making, the Twitter status stream. I thought the activity stream was a fabulous conceit; where status mixed happily with application updates, posted content, image uploads and implicit actions. To me what has resulted from the redesign is something less satisfactory than either activity or status stream. Only part of this feeling is from a visual and conceptual design standpoint. The other part goes far deeper into something which fascinates me. Intent. At the beginning of many a discourse about social software some people talk foolishly about audiences, the smarter people talk about finding the right users and communities, very few talk about intent. Why people are there, their brain state and what they want to do in these digital spaces.
What interests me about Twitter, is that through their site, through clients such as Twitterific, Tweetie and TweetDeck, I can be part of a long form conversation which ebbs and flows, branches and regroups. This conversation is all about the now, the “near now”, or the “just gone now”. It makes the most, for me, of what Matt Jones calls the nowish (companion of the hereish). The short status updates have been wonderfully subverted into social bookmarking strategies, social search, photoblogging, fundraising and messaging (and in some cases which we’d rather not have there, to rampant self-PR). All of this is to me social broadcast about current or near current time. It is a conversation, but it is one where there is asymmetry on broadcast over active listening. People are pushing their messages, sometimes tuned to a person or a group of friends, but more often than not just gently sending their message out to the wind like the seeds of a dandelion clock. Others are receiving, some are responding. Some responding honestly to people in mutual follows, others in the style of children jumping up, hands raised in the air, wanting teacher to notice. As such Twitter is great for social discovery of people through the content they put out; that content being their thoughts.
I’ve believed for the past year or so that MySpace has some similarities to Twitter on certain levels. It has more similarities than with Facebook in my opinion, but it is in the intent where there are similairities and also differences. It isn’t really a social network in the sense that Facebook or LinkedIn are. It probably should have asymmetric follow/following, as the majority of the friendships there are in essence follows. People following bands their fans of. People following other users to see what others are interested in.
In essence, MySpace is about two main principles. Social discovery of content and social discovery through content.
As such it’s perfectly suited to both the wealth of content there and to the needs of the majority of its audience. It is about trying on new people, new concepts, new content and seeing what fits. For a percentage of its audience it’s also a game of collection and discovery. Who can have the most friends, who can find the coolest new things and distribute them the furthest, being the cool leader of the pack. It’s far more of a social content portal than it is a social network in my opinion. It is a social lens where everyone can be John Peel for their group of friends. In the same way that every band and label would send their material to John Peel for him to find and disseminate the hidden gems, filtered through his lens with his knowledge of his audience ever present. So now, new bands and established labels send their content to MySpace for people to discover, love, and tell their friends. It’s also a great place for strengthening the ties of friendship through the mediation of content. Making weak ties stronger by laminating them with layer upon layer of shared interests in media and discovery. You might not like all the things I like, but our shared interests bring us together and I may discover some new wonderful things along the way. Thank you John Peel for The Cocteau Twins, Scritti Politti, New Order, Grandmaster Flash, Detroit techno, Chicago house, The Undertones and The Cabaret Voltaire.
Facebook though on the main, for the majority of its 200 million users is different. It’s not about discovery at all. I’ve often described Facebook as CRM for friends. It is a highly efficient way of keeping you in touch with what I have often heard people at Facebook describe as your “real friend graph”. It has so many eloquent mechanisms which when deconstructed against analyses of pre-industrial revolution village life suggest that is is a machine for friendship.
One of the cleverest aspects to “old Facebook” is what I often term activity scrobbling. The capture and display in an activity stream of your implicit actions. This for me is in many ways more fascinating in terms of keeping the heartbeat of close friendship together than the mechanic of the status update. The pictures someone has uploaded or tagged. The applications they use. The links they posted. The reason why I find these more fascinating is that they’re better conversation pieces more often than not when in real life I see the person who “scrobbled” them. While it’s lovely to be able to comment on a status as an immediate feedback within the Facebook interface; it’s like banter. It’s not the nucleus or seed of a discussion. The deeper heartbeat of a friendship is often in or around a reaction to something external to each of you, something you know someone else has done (and you’d like to do), the promise of something you may be able to do together (listening to music, playing games) or the memories of something you have done together (photos and tagging). By having everything present in the new stream with a similar look and feel, it’s somehow through increased and smoother aggregation, disaggregated the intent. When I update my status I’m broadcasting, others can converse. When I upload something and there is implicit scrobbling I’m putting out a gift, a promise of more interactions to come.
They’ve done something else in their aggregation which I feel depersonalizes the stream too. Everything looks somewhat more alike. My actions within an application or my actions with the machine that is Facebook look very similar in layout to my explicit status updates. It’s now harder to filter things visually as to what is from someone and what is of someone. Maybe I’m thinking too hard about these nuances but from some conversations with casual and new users over the weekend I don’t think I am.
Some people have said that Facebook should be true to its own motives and be, like Apple’s Steve Jobs, ruthless in the execution of their plan. I’m all for clarity of thought, but I do feel that thought should be largely your own, rather than just seeing a shiny thing in the distance and chasing it. People go to different places online for different reasons, with a different frame of mind and a different motive. Copying a user interface is easy, shoehorning a different intent into your userbase’s actions may well be bad for business, Yahoo found that out a few years later as Tim’s subsequent tweet suggested.
