The Facebook UI approach
Happy birthday Facebook. You really shouldn’t have thrown us such a UI changing party. No really.
The fine folks at Facebook have met yet another calibration to the profile page. Which has caused feed-issues, stress-anxiety disorder and other maladies. It seems to have not been as thoroughly tested and communicated as folks would have liked.
Which begs the question – how much will we users put up with before we abandon it all together. Facebook users have shown a resilience to poorly thought through efforts. But at what point are users going to abandon the web interface all together? There are other options for mobile, desktop (and I’m holding out hope for Roku) to get your fix.
After all, as Ethan Beard of Facebook says -
“We want to be the underlying technology people use to connect with friends wherever they are on the Web.” -excerpted from NY Times
Perhaps rushed to market to compete with Google-mania? Is GoogleBuzz tolling the death knell for Facebook. I hardly think so. The barriers to entry are a little high (especially if you are not a gmail user – though that is a fast dwindling population. Though perhaps just enough of a threat to keep Facebook on their toes. Competition is good.
Not that the Google-tron doesn’t make me more than a little nervous. Here’s the Buzz-kill. When they came out, your followers and followees were public. You had to fix it yourself. They seemed to have fixed it.
But all that aside – picture a world where your calls, your email, your internet access (net neutrality much), your voicemail, your search, your browser, your cloud-based desktop computing, your social meanderings, the road you took, the satellite pictures of your home and work and favorite hangouts, your collaborative work with others, your im – was all controlled by one entity.
Oh and they are indexing and archiving all of this indefinitely. And extrapolating connections and generating profiles. They call that the Matrix. Ok not quite so doomsday, but you can see why it’s looking a little scary.