While this blog is primarily about ed-tech stuff, I also am interested in technology in general and social media so at time I will veer off topic. This is one of those days.
Yesterday about 3 million (est.) of my closest friends and I installed the new app from Facebook yesterday. Paper. Let’s ignore for the moment that there is already an app called Paper designed for content creators. (I suspect to hear about an undisclosed settlement in the next 6 months or an outright purchase by Facebook to squash any lawsuit.)
After installing the app, it prompts you to select a few news categories in which you are interested. Tech, Family, Humor and so forth. It then presents you with a magazine like layout of your Facebook feed along with stories based on your interests. It’s all very lovely and looks quite nice.
If it showed me the content I wanted, it might actually be useful.
You see, here’s my problem with this UI and the direction that facebook seems to be heading. I’ve totally lost control of what I see. I used to be able to sort my news feed into chronological order and have it stick. I used to see everything that my friends were doing. That’s no longer the case. Facebook now curates which posts I see. It only displays a small fraction of what actually happens on Facebook. I have about 120 friends. On any given day I bet I see content from 20. At least 80 of my friends post something every day. Where are the other 60? If I visit their wall I can see that they’re active and posting things. Facebook has just decided that I don’t care about what they post because I stopped responding or liking their posts. Hardly a valid metric by which to judge my level of interest.
My best friends in the world, with whom I interact frequently ( IRL and through Facebook) will post something on Facebook and I may never see it. Often times I will see them responding to comments a day or 2 later but I never saw the initial post. I often don’t see posts by my wife in my newsfeed and vice versa! If that doesn’t represent a failure of your social networking product, I don’t know what does.
Are they trying to save bandwidth? Are they trying to improve the experience? It sucks. Stop it. Don’t take away content and attempt to replace it with things you think I might be interested in. Show me what my friends are doing. Then add. In Paper, I can find no way to display items in chronological order any more. It’s simply “News Feed”.
What seems obvious and where the app excels is creating an app that becomes your hub for consuming and reviewing new content. Effectively they are making this the replacement for the space created by the shutdown of Google Reader. While there is currently no way to embed an rss feed directly, it appears that you get an amalgamation of the top headlines in the various categories. I suspect that’s enough for the average user.
They have also included options for the various read-it-later applications like Instapaper. This makes it easy to add items to a reading list which removes much of the chrome and annoyances that make many sites difficult to read. The open in safari option and send as message options appears to be gone.
If my complaints about the app and Facebook’s seeming inability to show me the content I want seem familiar, perhaps you’ve watched the wonderful video from Veratisum. He details exactly why Facebook is moving in this direction. Hint: it’s about money.
While I will continue to use the old Facebook app for a while, I’ll keep an eye on the new app as well. I do like the UI and find it to be fairly intuitive. Frankly, it’s pretty and I like pretty things. It’s also likely to undergo significant changes very quickly. I suspect that within a year though, the old app will be killed off.
While I love the way Facebook allows me to connect with friends and family, they would do well to remember that’s the core of their business. Not making money. If they continue to make it harder for me to interact with the people I care about and see what’s going on in their lives, I, and presumably many others, will find a new social media service which will.
Google+ anyone? Didn’t think so…