The best thinking on Facebook’s (r)evolution right now, or “the friction is YOU”.
Posted: September 24th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Culture & Cultural Anthropology, Social Media Platforms | Tags: culture, Facebook, futurism, redesign | Comments OffAs our culture rapidly changes under the yoke of technology, as these changes are forced upon it, it’s heartening to see the subtleties of Facebook’s effect being discussed from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, marketing, & privacy.
Here’s some thinking on Facebook big F8 announcements. I know it’s a lot (though far from all) to take in, but hey, it’s a lot to take in.
Not Sharing Is Caring: Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web (Facebook is Killing Taste)
Premise: Zuck wants you to share your every move, regardless of whether that move turned out to be a really good experience actually worth sharing. Frictionless sharing takes the curation element (or “taste”) out of your presentation.
UI implications: The news feed is now totally stories about your friends (status updates), whereas the minutiae of their liking & commenting has moved to the ticker.
Assessment: I don’t want you to know about every movie I watch, only the ones I liked so much I want to endorse them and thereby incorporate them into my personal brand. Media will become status, like wearing a logo, as a display of taste. People may be less inclined to experiment, because merely absorbing media now implies some sort of support for it.
What Facebook Open Graph Means for You
Premise: “You, the point of friction in their data mining, have just been excluded from the process.”
Assessment: I agree. Facebook wasn’t wringing every piece of information out of users, and information about users is the product it sells its customers, advertisers. The more it can collect about what you watch, listen to, like and use, the more money it makes.
Why Facebook Timeline Is Made For Its Youngest Users
Premise: Facebook’s Timelines is intended to facilitate the communication & sharing needs of younger users, and doesn’t really care if older folks want to ‘scrapbook’ (ie, blog) or not.
UI implications: Not everyone wants to blog or lifecast. Picking a header (‘cover’ picture) etc might be a little more tech/design-intensive than they desire, which may lead to a feeling of pressure instead of fun for some users (age agnostic). With customization comes a pressure to perform that some people might not appreciate.
Assessment: As far as I know, GenX is still the biggest participants on blogs, microblogs (Twitter) and Facebook. We’ll be ok, and the Millenials will too. Boomers who don’t work in the tech industry will not like any of this (UI changes or personal record). And GenZ? They could probably use a little MySpace. Expressing yourself is paramount in the Maslowian hierarchy of the young.
What newsrooms should know about new Facebook stream
Premise: Getting content seen depends on quantity of interactions (like & comments). More frequent posting is going to be required to get in front of people.
UI implications: Stories need to gather the momentum of user approval before they join Recent Stories
Assessment: A commenter thinks the author of this post has it all backwards, and branded pages have a better chance of being seen in the timeline. I dunno. I can tell you that as a brand manager I was masterminding an inside liking job like no other on Thursday, trying to push my update into people’s streams. It didn’t feel good, but it did feel necessary.
All Facebook thinks the ticker stands to be a huge force for branded page interaction, spreading social proof. This also benefits from grassroots liking, commenting, & sharing as every such action not only lends weight to GraphRank, but floods the ticker with evidence of how awesome your content is.
What Facebook Changes Mean for Marketers
Premise: Apps that provide real value, like Nike+ are going to be key; content is going to have to step up its game. Gathering likes means less than ever.
Assessment: The onus truly is on brands to earn a place in people’s lives.
The Ultimate in Privacy
Premise: The ticker is freaking people out. The “please hide my comments & likes for me” status that’s going around tries to put the onus for your privacy on your friends.
UI implications: We need to either get comfortable with all our actions being visible, or leave the system.
Assessment: The way the ticker is set up, it’s a bit of a reality check into “Hey, everyone can see what I do on the internet”. They always could, but aggregating those actions and explicitly revealing them makes people feel kinda naked.
The ticker doesn’t follow normal conversational conventions (though it does lead to new person/topic discovery, which is what Facebook is trying to facilitate to combat social graph boredom and purchasable media sharing). So I sort of see the freaked out users’ impetus for wanting to hid eall that minutiae; it isn’t actually intended for everyone; it functions beneath status updates as a subtle communication upon which it’s a bit awkward to shine a light.
There’s a distinction to be drawn between inappropriate sharing and action aggregation. When you see the sum of your actions gathered and reported by an insensitive algorithm, it seems like an unfairly black and white overview of your character.
This is precisely why the likes Sponsored Stories, Klout and retargeting bother privacy advocates so much: they lack context. They paint a partial picture by which we are judged, but that we can’t fail to own because it is, after all, constructed of our data.
We’re All Doomed: Facebook’s Giant Reality Show
Premise: “The lines between entertainment and real life disappear, as people use social media to broadcast whatever they want. Criminals like thieves and murders are followed online, given TV shows, endorsement deals as we as a culture begin to lose grip of reality. A world where everyone’s a celebrity and anything can be entertaining leads to murders and suicides for fun as advertisers monitor in-depth metrics on what we view and how. Our social lives are put in digital pens that lie to us and tell us that we are all stars”.
Assessment: No surprise: “Heavy reality television (RTV) viewers not only spend more time on sites like Facebook, they also have larger social networks, share more photos and are more likely to engage in “friendships” with people with whom they have no off-line relationship, a practice known as promiscuous friending”.
A generation is going to grow up living very public lives, because that provides more accurate information for advertisers.
Update
More thought-provoking stuff people are sending me.
Logging out of Facebook is not enough (from David Pensato)
Facebook: “We don’t track logged-out users”
Facebook Changes Upend Advertiser and Agency Models
Facebook Disconnect Chrome Extension
Facebook’s Eerie Goal: Why Timeline Changes Everything (from David Pensato)
Facebook is Scaring Me
What Facebook’s latest updates mean for journalists
How Not To Make Music Social: The Way Spotify And Facebook Did It
Facebook confirms ‘Like’ data collection, will fix three cookie-related issues within 24 hours (from Nico Wlock)
No, you aren’t going to quit Facebook
Is Facebook trying to kill privacy?
The Pros & Cons of Frictionless Sharing
It’s the end of the web as we know it
The Problem With Facebook’s New ‘Frictionless’ Sharing
Facebook is getting too damn complicated
