The Trouble With Facebook

For a long time, I thought that Facebook would be immune from the typical media technology cycle of becoming poplular than then getting supllanted by something else (like myspace, yahoo, aol).  After all, my *mother* (who can’t seem to find the shift key on the computer) is a Facebok user.  Facebook has more users than than populations of the majority of th world’s countries.

Facebook has become almost as much of a “utility” as Google or maybe even as much as the Internet itself.  It has revolutionized the way people reach out and keep in touch.  Businesses depend on Facebook to build relationships with customers.  But, somehow Facebook is becoming a chore rather than a “party”  Part of the reason for this is that for something that is clearly in the big leagues – the interface itself is ever-changing is a flaky sort of way.

As Ann Hill writes in her article in the Huffington Post:

What Facebook should really worry about is that being on Facebook is no longer fun for a growing number of users. It is a necessity for many, an amusement for some, but mostly it is a chore. Facebook is in danger of becoming the DMV of social networking sites: we go there because we have to, not because we want to.

Facebook has largely brought this on themselves by the clumsy, opaque way they have instituted changes on the site. But public relations snafus aside, with every addition of new “features” the site has become more labyrinthine to navigate for regular users. What could have been a series of useful, well-designed upgrades to streamline and improve the user experience has instead turned the site into a Winchester Mystery House of functionality: you may know how to complete that common action today, but where will the link be to it tomorrow? That’s anyone’s guess.

 

I’ve found that most people don’t want to have to “mess” with technology or repeatedly “figure out” how to get things done online.  And, while it good to make improvements to your platform to update and make it easier to use, it sometimes seems like Facebook makes changes just to confuse users (like some giant psychologal experiment), Facebook seems to make changes that are randomly useful and then doesn’t communicate them to users.  Or, the changes are deployed without warning (like when the fan page width changed from 720px to 520px) and overnight hundreds of thousands of fan pages are broken. 

Although the “users” of Facebook are not really Facebook’s customers (the advertisers and third party developers are) not being able to communicate changes to the users makes Facebook very vunerable to a something new (especially of the new platform is easy to use and not ever-changing…)