Facebook's Feeds

The other morning my oldest daughter Jessica, a Facebook fan, said to me, "Dad one of the great things about Facebook is that they are constantly adding cool new things". That's one of the things I believe is critical to do with web apps/services - always add new stuff, surprise your user base.

So I asked her to show me this cool new thing. It was an feed of activities of her contacts on Facebook. Instead of having to navigate around Facebook, she was being presented with her daily newspaper of activity. She saw, for example, that one of her friends had just broken up with his girlfriend (he changed his status from taken to single). It was one of those moments where you see something and realize you are looking into the future.

That got me off the dime and into Facebook. Here's my profile in case you are interested in being my friend (I've got a post working on that topic too). You can also read my blog on my Facebook profile page if you like, I imported it via my FeedBurner feed.

I did some reading up on this new move by Facebook and found this quote from Mark Zuckerberg on Forbes.com:

"Before, it was an encyclopedia model, but now we’re changing to a news model"

This is a big deal. Social networks to date have been these big unmanageable messes. Facebook is addressing that by giving users a tool to consolidate the information they care about (Jessica's friend tagged four photos with her name the other day - that's worth knowing).

But apparently many of the users don't like it. Jessica told me last night, "people are really upset about this new information on Facebook". She said she thinks its great, but many of her friends don't like it.

Well Jessica is right. The users are upset. This article in MediaPost this morning talks about the significant user revolt over the new Facebook view. Almost 300,000 of Facebook's 9 million users have joined a protest group.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post on the Facebook blog yesterday called Calm down. Breathe. We hear you. He says:

And we agree, stalking isn’t cool; but being able to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives is. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about. You don’t miss the photo album about your friend’s trip to Nepal. Maybe if your friends are all going to a party, you want to know so you can go too. Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them.

He goes on to say:

The privacy rules haven’t changed. None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes. .....  We’re going to continue to improve Facebook, and we want you to be part of that process. Test out the products and continue to provide us feedback. Use your privacy settings so you can feel most comfortable using the site.

It's a good post. In my experience when users are passionate about a service, they often react negatively to new stuff. Facebook is changing the experience in a significant way by surfacing in a very efficient (but also very public) way the data that is already in the system.

Users will have to react to this. They'll have to think more about their privacy options. Or just get used to it. Because this is what the power of feeds and social networks is all about. This is the future.

Comments

[Fred]

Indeed, users are reacting to it. The problem here is not that Facebook has changed the experience in any quantitative fashion - there's no "new" informaton being disclosed - but that the qualitative experience of information disclosure has deeply changed.

Facebook is an interesting place. Users "friend" each other as a show of affection - its cultural currency on a college campus. As I've seen in my research, users average hundreds of friends - obviously more friends than anyone could juggle. Implicit in this mass "friendship" is that the bond is weak. More or less, people in the Facebook aren't checking all their "friends" profiles every day - nor do they care to.

Facebook has changed the cultural definition of friendship in the service. When people friended each other, all it meant was you were friends - not that the people you friend get to see everything you do in your life. Yes, people could stalk this information from you if they wanted - but there was safety in numbers, in the sense that this sort of stalking behavior wasn't the norm.

The audience of the Facebook is college students, particularly college students. Logical arguments about "it isn't any different" simply don't work because - well - young people are young people. They are going to believe what they want to believe - and if the new features make them uncomfortable, then no logic is going to reverse that. Let that be a lesson to the Harvard MBA's with their qualitative analysis.

Facebook has broken the culture of its product with this new update. Facebook's users have a deep emotional investment in the service, so this affects them at a very visceral level. Logical arguments and blog posts telling people to "calm down" won't work - this is a change that needs to be addressed.

[Tim Post]

I think Fred Stutzman comments are right on the mark.

I have a dozen college students who work for me in our yoga studio here in Boston next to Boston University. Every single kid uses Facebook daily. The same way we, over 30 year old, check our Blackberries, the kids check their Facebook pages.

The important point raised by Fred is that there doesn't seem to be a material difference between the terms "friend" and "acquiantence."

Most Facebook uses have many dozens, if not hundreds, of these so called friends. Perhaps the issue could be solved be giving the users the ability to differeniate between acquiantences and friends?

The new features would apply to freinds but not acquiantences.

[Laurent Kretz]

Agreed on the friends vs acquintances.
But there are two points that I feel are very interesting in this subject

Information available before by browsing is now available by feed. As Mark says, there is no change in the privacy setting, just the way the info is spread out. So the effect is that it might make people realize the impact reveiling personal details can have. It's easy to write a post about a personal feeling, situation, or experience. Takes five minutes. Than realizing dozens, hundreds or thousands of people will be able to read it, use it, quote it might be stressful ...

The second one is about future, as Fred states it. Web enables "one to many". RSS allows "automatic one to many". I guess this feature is "automatic many to many" applied to social, organic networks. This is very interesting ....

[Bill Seitz]

It would be cool if Facebook released a histogram showing the distribution of number_of_friends for the population of complainers, vs the total Facebook user population...

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2006-08-29-WilsonAggregatingMessages

[Ian Spivey]

The friends vs. acquaintances problem is the heart of the protestation. On the Facebook, I have acquaintances whose profiles I may not have even checked since I added them; I don't want to know every time those people add a new favorite band to their profile. I'm personally more concerned with being bombarded with useless noise than I am about others reading about my updates -- they could always do that.

I'd be much happier if I could opt out of having certain friends in my news feed. All we'd need is an "X" to the right of each item in the feed, allowing users to unsubscribe from individual friends' feeds. Then I'd also feel comfortable that people who don't really know me won't be reading about my every doing; they'll likely unsubscribe from my feed as well.

If the Facebook team can keep users interested and comfortable, this could really be a watershed in the adoption of news aggregation. After all, once you're comfortable with subscribing and unsubscribing from friends on Facebook, how are their blog, or someone else's blog, or an online 'zine any different?

[csven]

The general lack of distinction in our culture between friends, acquaintances, and something else, is increasingly an issue in many ways. In general, computing technology demands the kind of specificity the public avoids. This isn't just about defining a "friend" on Facebook, it goes all the way to one of the president's advisors saying he was "technically correct" in his assertions implying that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium. The culture is still living in an age of conversational assumptions, yet our politics and our technology are increasingly demanding that we adjust to this new world linguistic order.

One of the areas where I've seen this issue pop up is in the Second Life virtual world where a "friend" also has the power to locate someone in the virtual world (I'm unsure if it's been recently changed due to longtime complaints). What does this have to do with anything? Simple. RFID technology is making its way into real world systems as seemingly mundane as businesscards. Merely shaking hands could pass traceable, trackable data between casual, once-met individuals - especially if Microsoft's patents on skin as part of a computing system bear fruit.

Imagine if, instead of making impersonating phone calls, investigators for HP had merely bumped into one of the board members at a happy hour.

We need to think very carefully about where all this is going. This situation with Facebook is a very small piece of a much, much larger issue.

[Garry Freemyer]

Thanks for clearing the problem by stating that it was that acquantances were being treated as friends.

I personally would not mind, but there should be options to control who is considered a "Friend"a and who is an acquaintance and what info if any you want shared with both, or each.

Fact is though, one should be careful what one puts on the internet for the purpose of having others see it. You might get what you wish for but more than you want.

[P-Air]

The first comment above by Fred is excellent and reminds me of the issues frequently raised in relation to Jigsaw, the sales leads service. In Jigsaw's case they enable users to enter leads (presumably biz people's contact info) in exchange for being able to receive leads. The complaint here has been that people may end up in this database from simply having given their business card during a meeting w/o expecting it to be distributed. Given that before Jigsaw, nothing was to stop two or more sales people fm sharing leads, the Jigsaw service simply made this process more explicit.

The shake up comes because handing a business card to someone has an implicit "Here's mine and I have yours, so I know I can trust you w/my info" protocol, but this protocol is not explicit. Friend connections in most social networks are similar to this (and why I won't connect to people on LinkedIn unless I have a *real* relationship w/them) in the implicit vs. the explicit meaning of it all.

People on social networks are just connecting for the novelty of it, w/o considering the responsibility that comes w/saying that you know (or are friends) w/that person. Looks like Facebook users are now learning what comes w/that responsibility ;)

[Jay]

Even more disconcerting from a privacy perspective, though, is the fact that the News Feeds not only note additions to your profile, but also highlight information that was removed. It used to be that if you put something up, and later felt it was in your interests to take it down (e.g., listing "getting high" as one of your interests), then that information was gone without a trace. But now, taking down that information would result in a News Feed item that would say something along the lines of, "Fred Wilson has removed 'getting high' as one of his interests". Information that would have been removed is now highlighted and archived, and this strikes me as a serious, serious problem.

In addition, the post points out that Facebook has a blog, which is true, but you should also know that the blog originally allowed comments. Within hours of the News Feeds feature going live (at about 4am on Tuesday), there were hundreds of comments on the announcement post, nearly all of them negative. Facebook's response was to erase all the comments and disable the commenting feature. What's coming across is an attitude that "Facebook knows best" (if you read Zuckerberg's blog post in this light, this attitude is readily apparent), and that any users who are complaining simply aren't using the service "correctly". This is turning off a lot of people, and it's poor business practice to boot; if you have a service, and a huge proportion of your users aren't using in the way you intended, you need to either change your expectations or realize that you're going to lose a lot of your userbase in the transition. Every public statement they've made seems to be pointing toward the latter. It's unfortunate, but it's the path they're headed toward.

[Alex]

The key issue here isn't friends v. acquaintances, or the nuances of the contemporary college social experience, but rather the gradual integration of new communication technologies into society.

Facebook is doing the right thing by increasing the value it provides its users, but - in this case - perhaps could have done a better job getting feedback from a sample before rolling a clearly immature solution out network-wide.

Of course, plenty of questions about college life and the social pressures to invite and accept new "friends" in a service like Facebook - or mySpace, LinkedIn, or any other social networking tool, are relevant - but that isn't the heart of it this time.

And, to Fred's point about the MBAs: Zuckerberg didn't finish college.

[Andrew]

I disagree with Zuckerberg's claim that Facebook didn't change any privacy settings. I understand his claim, which is that no more or less personal information about individuals is accessible to users than before. It's true, and I agree with that statement. However, privacy is not just access to informaiton. The presentation of accessible information broke down significant barriers to users learning personal information about their friends. The inconvienence of clicking through 20 pages to find the same amount of information that is now visible on the front page causes privacy to be violated. This privacy was previously protected by the extreme inconvienence of finding the information previously, which is a powerful barrier. Until Zuckerberg realizes that access to information isn't the only component of privacy, he's just going to continue to piss off the Facebook protestors.

Also, I would like to echo Jay's point about removing information now being a news event. This is NEW information that was not previously presented or even accessible to Facebook users, which is a violation of privacy by any definition.

Finally, I'd like to say I LOVE the new Facebook, and I don't want it to go away. I just really don't like Zuckerberg's handling of the mess he made.

[Tom Morris]

It's great but it doesn't go far enough. They need to put out RSS for these feeds! I want to read this in my aggregator!

[Mosuki]

Technology is not just about providing better features, it's also about providing a safe and comfortable experience for the user. Airbags don't make cars drive better, but they are an advancement in car technology. The future of social networks is to enable information to be shared between users without giving up their right to privacy and ultimately safety.

We've built a system that can distinguish between friends and acquaintances and which provides feeds of activity in your social network, while still respecting a user's privacy. "Caveat user" is just a way of avoiding a difficult, but solvable, problem.

http://blog.mosuki.com/10/caveat-user-is-a-cop-out

[sspecialme11]

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Thanks.