Ever wake up in a twlight zone, where everything that you think is true - is trounced on by limited thinking users demanding their status quo - back?  It must have been the full moon.

By now everyone must have heard that many Facebook users did not the new News Feed feature - which shows what their friends have been up to - recently.  I think the solution would have been to have this feature set default to OFF - and set up everyone’s accounts so that they show NOTHING to ANYBODY.

Then as folks would discover this feature, they’d turn it on and have fun with it.  The Mini feed literally just puts functionality they had already - in one place.  But yet - folks are freaking out.

Speculation is flying as to “what will or won’t prevail in this debacle?”

Further observations shows that the problems of a large network - with 1,000,000s of people on it - simply would not exist if you had as small intimate network to work with. Folks would feel more comfortable providing feeback, instead of havigng to create huge uproars, new features could get gradually leaked and feedback collected long before they go live and in general - any single change would only effect a MUCH SMALLER number of people, thereby lessening he overall effect of the change.

We used to run into this problem at Tribe all the time.  We’d turn on new features - and folks would holler and scream. Then we figured out that if we sneaked it to key people and previewed the new stuff - they’d actually welcome the changes.

Remember these are people who are there - by choice - not because they HAVE to be there.

Big places change bigly.  Stumbling, throwing huge switches that effect millions in fail swoop.  Certain clients of ours have that problem - or shall I say challenge.  But I’m confidant they’ll learn from this debacle.

While small intimate places listen and talk directly to their user - with a sincere ear - and in fact they themselves are the users - too - so everyone partricipates in the changes.

That’s what really going on at Facebook - backlash from a place that is just too dam BIG.

If folks would try out these new featurews (from a fun POV) and turn off ANYTHING that they might be sensitive about - I think everything will be fine. Turn off the feature by default and let peopple Opt In.

This is all such a shame, because as Pete points out - Facebook has been doing some incredible, ground breaking suff - that we’re all going to benefit from.  I wonder how this will effect their TOS and attitude towards exporting this user data. I sure know how I’ll argue:

“Dudes - you gotta make up for this debacle by showing your users that you KNOW that THEY control their user data - not you. Stop calling it ‘Facebook data’.  Its your CUSTOMER’s data, not yours!  Let that data be FREE!”

I also wonder if Facebook users know how lucky they are to have such coolio features as a dynamically displayed page, which shows different stuff to deifferent people - based upon who they are.  We had that in the original PeepAgg and we plan to bring it back.

And this whole “what are my friends up to” feature - completely rocks.  Now we just have to find the courage to turn it on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 9:34 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.