August 13, 2008

So FaceBook’s new UI got pushed out to me with a letter from Zuckerberg verbosely proclaiming their commitment to usability and neatness blah blah.

Cutting to the chase, I have to say that the new interface delivers for me. It’s definitely a huge improvement in information management and keeps everything a heckuvalot more contextual. It took about 3 minutes for me to turn from skeptical to appreciative. I am sure others will have varying perspectives on this.

M4

One of the clear drawbacks of this interface is that it is less “festive”. The older layout clearly had more commotion which translated to a user feeling that they were in an active network. This interface is more elective and that might actually translate into FB seeing fewer page views or atleast slow-down perceived growth.

I really like the “Boxes” section on any given profile. That used to drive me nuts… watching endless applications swimming around people’s profiles for no apparent reason.

On a personal level, the new UI gets me what I want - access to my wall, messages, status updates and if I want, I can add an application as a tab. Again keeping it neat. Unlike a lot of the other social networks, the one thing I enjoy about FB is the technical discipline and focus on information architecture. They executed beautifully on FB-Chat with their Erlang-C++ hybrid, “dark launching” wisely to see if anything collapsed. They also have an excellent design in place for their photo storage to tackle their 100M+ photo submissions a week along with figuring out a way to avoid depending on CDNs like Akamai to deliver frequently accessed photos. I am not sure if the ‘Haystack’ concept went live yet, but it will be interesting to see how that executes.

In keeping with that caution and concern, they have prominently offered a “Back to the old Facebook” option. You would expect FB’s young development team to be a bit more rambunctious, but they are far from it. They put the users first and always have a fall-back option. In my belief, as long as they continue to keep that discipline within their ranks - they are always going to be in a position of value. OpenSocial and other initiatives on open development platforms would have never been a top concern to me because content is king and since FB and MySpace are the prime custodians of it, no Open platform is going to magically take that away just because it makes vendors happy.

This was me on a forum in October 2007:

I don’t see what tangible advantage a 100% Open Source version of Facebook would be to Consumers and Vendors when they have no control over the Ad Engine or Consumer Data.

How does any community profit from this other than the founders? And if there is a way to profit - would that method be something you cannot accomplish with Facebook today?

The key “value” and “asset multiplier” for a social network is not the technology stack. It is the people and the social graphs they build. If that social graph is not “open”, then there is no tangible advantage to the Community.

Source.

Keep it up FB, someday maybe you’ll wake up and do FaceBay instead of pushing weird ads for laptop batteries to me :).

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