Facebook’s founder got man of the year from Time. Whatever one thinks about that label, it just puzzles me.
Why did that guy succeed? And by this, I have two questions, really. Why Facebook over other social networks? But even more so, why do people like Facebook, or Twitter for that matter?
First, my pet theory is that Mr. Z was clever in using the universities to create the critical mass needed for a social network to succeed. From what little I know, Facebook started as a university-only site offering a safe, restricted space to have students communicating with each other online. And it was embraced. And then it was was opened up and people flocked to it as the family of university students, their colleagues, etc., rolled onto it.
In other words, incubate a social networking site and then open it up when it reaches critical mass.
A different view: bait-and-switch. Classic.
Okay, now for the part that gets me scratching my head. What is Facebook? I see a wall of noise. I see people posting things I generally do not care about with a few things that I do. Actually, I rarely ever see anything as I find the noise utterly annoying and don’t check often. So it puzzles me.
Are people trying to create noise in their lives? Is that why Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., are popular? Is there some vacuum in their life that they are trying to fill with this? Or is it something else that I am completely missing?
So here is what I would envision being a cool replacement system that I would like. I use Google Reader (auto blog feeding into one page, for those that do not know) and I write blogs. Multiple blogs for multiple purposes. And I have installed wordpress multiple times. Annoying. But the content is different, the audience may become different (yeah, not just you two, maybe, someday). I could use categories and all, but I also want to have different themes and the feeds, well, do readers subscribe to different categories? And how do I restrict the public from some posts, but not all?
And wouldn’t it be nice if important news could get to you about people and the noise can exist for browsing when bored, but not impinging on your world.
So what I want are channel blogs or, clogs. That is, a blog with different channels, different feeds where you can easily manage what various readers (say by their email) can see and they can login to customize their feed to include whatever subset of the options given to them and to browse that noise that they do not see usually. Now, by login, I don’t mean with yet another username and password. I am not sure what I mean, but using internet id stuff or just a dark web link that they can use for that purpose. Something simple. You type in their email into the system. They get an email with instructions as to how to get their feed up and running.
And each such “user” is in the system in groups or what have you and you can manage which categories they can see, which ones are public, etc. Comments could also be tied in so that one can specify which groups can comment, which groups can see/comment on which other groups, etc. And varying themes as well.
Because I think that is what Facebook and Twitter are somehow dancing around. Customizable, semi-private streams of information. Cinfo. Or Cspsi. I like clogs.
So how can this be done? Well, a 0.8 approach would be to take WordPress and build plugins to do this. Some of this functionality already exists, but it shouldn’t be too hard to design a reader database with the various options. There is what the author uses and then what the reader chooses. It would be a single feed for each user; that would not change, but what is being fed would change.
The comments would be more difficult and securing wordpress would be hard. It either calls PHP for each page (goodbye cache), or it uses darkweb urls to avoid most snooping. And one would need to get the bots off the network. I suppose it would only darkweb the semi-private while the public posts would seem normal.
How about the reader? Any blog reader works for now as long as the user can control what comes in. Throttle the news in the feeder settings.
Comments, well, that is for the next system.
The above could almost be rolled out now. It would just work for those who have a blog and use blog readers.
But 1.0 would be a new website with apps. It would be kind of like Google Reader and WordPress.com combined. One would login and have the reader feeds to peruse and a way to create content and then tag/categorize it. And off it would go. Clogging. And of course, one keeps the feeds going so to get the news stream, one does not need to login. Ideally, the logging in for news is mainly for setting the feeds and for browsing that which one does not get in the feed stream.
Done right, this could have several competing sites all partaking from the same feed stream and generating it. No single site needs to dominate, but you would have your network intact. I could imagine some sort of simple protocol designed to export/import feed listings so that one could take the network one has and move it about.
To me, that would be what I would want to see. I like to know about what distant friends are doing, but not what they had for dinner. If they get married, divorced, have kids, switch jobs, come up with some amazing insight (like clogs), etc., etc., then that is stuff I would be happy to be inundated with. But not the noise.
Not the noise.
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You just wanted to coin the term “clog,” didn’t you? Anyway, here are my two cents on why Facebook succeeded.
Incubating within universities and then opening it to the public at critical mass is only partway to the answer. Many competing social networking sites took a similar approach (see: Campus Network. Never heard of it? See link below), so why did Facebook triumph? That is, why was Facebook embraced in colleges over the rest to begin with, and then why was it subsequently embraced by the general public?
I’d say it was the accumulation of many smart decisions and good executions, rather than one overarching principle or concept. The dominant sites at the time were Friendster and MySpace. Both were spammy, slow, unreliable, and ugly. Facebook improved in all of those areas.
One of the bigger things that Facebook did right was to strike the balance between fulfilling what the 80% of users wanted from such a site and keeping things simple. In a BBC interview (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/12/wayne_ting_nearly_a_billionair.html), one of the Campus Network founders makes the point that their system was too complex, causing it to draw only the geeky crowd. Facebook was simple enough that it enticed the much larger segment of ordinary people who don’t have an inherent interest in managing computing systems but just want to interact with friends (and hook up) and go on with their lives. This makes up the modus operandi of most Facebook users still today, whether they’re fraternity brothers or secretaries or grandmothers. And even the geeks mostly have links to these “ordinary people.”
The interesting thing is that over time, Facebook has gotten much more complex. The range of features and settings is dizzying. You can install Facebook apps, you can tie into third-party services, you can create groups, you can even do many of the things you talk about with clogs, such as managing friends lists, controlling what each list sees, and fine-tuning what you yourself see.
Despite the increasing complexity, these so-called ordinary people are getting along with it just fine. As Facebook has grown, the people have grown with it and through it. Facebook activity is flourishing, and reshaping the connections people build and keep with one another, for better or worse. True, this has always been the case with BBS chat rooms, but never on this scale. So in this sense, Zuckerberg as Time Person of the Year makes slightly more sense. But then again, the Time thing doesn’t count for much anymore.
Yes about coining “clog”, but I also like putting out an hypothesis and seeing it get shot down.
That interview is quite interesting and so are the links. Thanks for sharing. I guess it is exactly this kind of interaction here that I would want to see on a social networking site. Post a thoughtful piece, have people discuss it–correcting it, augmenting it, agreeing, disagreeing, whatever. That is, have a thoughtful, intellectual society where people expose their thoughts and opinions not in a noisy way, but in a quiet, reflective way.
My main lesson learned is that I am a geek. I like thoughtful discussion.
On reflection, using campus networks does suggest using a dumbed down interface. Because these people are geographically nearby, a conversation in person is both easy and preferable. So what a site perhaps really needs in that situation is just peacock feathers and stirring up motion. And that is what facebook apparently did. Then they opened up and added features, features that **I** don’t want to learn.
Oh, and I saw the cover for Person of the Year. Got to say that that is not a flattering picture.
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