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Puzzled by Facebook

March 25, 2009 BY Mark Evans

Facebook
To be honest, I don’t get Facebook.

I don’t get why Facebook continues to see major growth (150 million registered users and counting).

I don’t see why companies and marketers are so fascinated with tapping into Facebook despite the fact Facebook users show little interest in advertising and marketing.

And I don’t understand why Facebook seems to operate in what appears to be strategic isolation by making decisions that are universally rejected.

Case in point is the recent overhaul of Facebook’s home page design, which was panned, criticized, attacked and disliked. Facebook has been forced to do a mea culpa, and make all kind of changes to appease the angry masses.

In typical fashion, Facebook doesn’t really admit to making a mistake. Instead, it suggests that it did extensive testing, and will now do a redesign of the redesign based on valuable feedback.

Of course, Facebook making strategic stumbles and then brushing them aside is nothing new. The same thing happened when it introduced Beacon, which was, frankly, a strategic disaster. To Facebook, Beacon wasn’t a mistake but something not properly implemented, and offered to let people to opt-out of Beacon.

If you want more evidence of strategic bumbles, what about the applications ecosystem that Facebook ignited only to try to reign it when third-party developers starting to see huge financial success.

It makes you wonder whether Facebook is doing enough due diligence on the decisions being made, and whether its strategic focus is too insular as opposed to serving the needs of its users.

Facebook’s biggest challenge may be its success. When you’re growing, life appears to be so good you fail to see or refuse to see things you’re doing wrong.

Update: The New York Times has a story (March 29) looking at whether Facebook has grown up too fast. What caught my attention is the fact Facebook is adding one million new users a week.

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  • http://yoursinwriting.com Josh Prowse

    Can I suggest that what you don’t “get” is Facebook The Company. They are, admittedly, out to lunch. (Perhaps that’s what happens when you let Microsoft give you $200 million.) But that doesn’t matter.

    Please tell me you get Facebook The Application. You have to get why the user base is growing. It’s the high school cafeteria of the internet. Everybody wants to start, end, and intermittently inject their daily browsing with visits there to get information about the people they care about.

    It doesn’t matter how bad the UI is. It doesn’t matter what services they add or pull. Facebook’s ability to fulfil a basic need nobody knew they had has made it unstoppable.

    And it will devour us all.

  • http://yoursinwriting.com Josh Prowse
    • http://www.portabledigitalprojectors.org Digital Projectors

      I have to agree with you. I've tried and tried, but Tweeting is the most pointless waste of time ever As if our attention spans aren't short enough already, now we can't even hold a normal conversation!

  • http://joshuamarch.co.uk Joshua March

    Hi Mark,

    Some good comments.

    I would point out that the criticism of the Facebook re-design only came from a small minority of users (remember they have around 200 million active users), and that Facebook keep a very careful eye on the real data on their user behaviour. The changes they refer to in the blog post (moving requests to the right hand from the middle, giving more control over application feed stories, and improving the highlights section) are all minimal compared to the overall re-design which prompted the outcry.

    The number of people complaining is also far smaller, as a percentage of the userbase, the those who created an outcry when Facebook first developed the newsfeed – a format which was a massive factor in Facebook’s success, and which has subsequently become the de-facto format for many social sites.

    Facebook’s research has previously shown that users who are exposed to active engagement (e.g. uploading, tagging or commenting on photos) are far more likely to engage in that behaviour themselves. The new homepage has been designed expressly to highly active sharing and engagement in as many ways as possible; that Facebook are keeping the overall re-design suggests very heavily that their internal data shows it to be working in terms of user engagement, despite what a small number of users may be saying.

    Cheers,

    Josh

  • http://fathawar.spaces.live.com Farhan Thawar

    There are two things going on here. One is that you don’t get what people are SAYING about Facebook, not what people are DOING. Always value what people do vs. what they say. I don’t care much about the feedback people leave on a website unless it’s backed up by usage data.

    #2 is, you don’t have to understand it. Heck, I don’t understand why people ever pay with INTERAC when they can use a credit card, get rewards and 0% interest for 26 days, but INTERAC is a billion dollar business.

  • sash r

    To be harsh, Mark Z will go down in history as one of the biggest idiots there ever was in business. Facebook at it’s height valued at 15+ Billion USD with no revenue model. Offers were flying behind the scenes, and they took 200M from Gates & Co.

    Myspace and YouTube both sold at enormous amounts and are still not revenue generators. But they SOLD at the right time.

    Mark continues to play and play with monetary models new UI’s and is trying to re-capture the hay day of two years ago.

    I am sorry, but if someone offers your billions of dollars of a dorm room experiment you take it, run with it, invest in other things.

    Bit of a rant, but the guys a moron.

  • Laurinda

    I use facebook simply because my whole damn family is on it. Its like making one phone call that reaches the masses. Easy to upload pics of the kids, talk about personal things that only family and friends care about. Its fast, its easy, and it reaches my cousin in Vancouver and my aunt in Richmond Hill.

    The key thing here is that its personal. The conversation here is between those I care about. Not the world at large. Therefore, I avoid any work / professional friends. I’m sure my boss would love to see my 4 yr old covered in cake.. Or the trip my boyfriend and I took… So for professional friends… there is LinkedIn.

    I’m thankful to facebook for being the one stop shop for all my personal conversations.

    • Mark C

      100% agree with this. It is a private village green – to keep up to date and interact with family and old friends. I now have a closer relationship with my cousins all around the world – I wouldn;t have ever gone to teh trouble of phoning them but now i can swap photso, birthday and Xmas updates etc. It moves at a slower pace than twitter – I don;t want to know what my family/friends do every hour – just every week or month is OK and FB failitates that.

  • Michael

    Wanted to comment in specific about the outcry that came as a result of the Facebook changes that occurred recently.

    I find the outcry to be rather fascinating, an examining the reaction of the masses could almost be some kind of psychological study.

    What I take from it in general, is two things:

    1. People hate change
    2. The fact that FB users had such a strong reaction when Facebook “disrupted” their browsing experience, truly shows how ingrained it has become in their lives

    Item #2 — I think what Mark fails to realize is that some people are addicted to Facebook. It has become part of their lives. For many it is their first choice for communication over the internet (why use email when you can use FB?), their primary resource for planning events, the only place to view photos, a place to play games (poker, anyone?) etc. etc. etc.

    Item #1 — I work in IT and am aware of the concept of a “change resistor”. This term probably describes at least 75% of users. It is the person who hates change, and complains because they were used to the “old way” of doing things, despite the fact that the new system is a million times better. This is the same person who – after getting used to the new system – agrees that it is superior and then complains again when another change is done! The same concept can be applied when FB makes a change. Hundreds of people complain for all of two days, then once they get used to it, go back to their FB-browsing ways without a peep.

    Conclusion: I think Facebook is here to stay. It has absolutely become an essential part of many people’s lives.

    Comments?

  • http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1483502 Landover

    I'm with Laurinda. I use it because everyone else is on it. By "use it" I don't mean that I'm there everyday or that I even log in once a month…UNLESS something in my email reminds me that I need to check it. I have actually gotten tired of all of that stuff. First it was Myspace and now it's Facebook. What will it be tomorrow?

    Landover Baptist Church

    Landover Baptist Church

  • Pingback: Dictating the future of communication with Facebook «

  • http://1stedtion.wordpress.com faiz4n

    Hey Mark,

    I loved the way you described Facebook's appeasement policy. "Redesigning the redesign!".. haha! thats exactly what they do!

    I've included it in my blogpost about FB.

    Cheers!

  • http://www.maclarenstrollerreview.com/maclaren-twin-triumph-stroller-coffee-brown/ Raja

    Hi
    Irrespective of you or me think about face book,I it is growing rapidly.people are speniding more time on social networking sites than ever before.This has been used well by many social networking sites like facbook,orkut etc.There are many new competitors coming every now an then.