Is Facebook Losing Its Magic Touch?

October 18, 2011 • Anthony Tsou  
Filed under III. Opinions

Facebook changes spark user dissatisfaction, which may only be the beginning.

Facebook has taken the online community by storm. Since its inception in 2004, Facebook has continuously expanded at an exponential rate. As of July 2011, Facebook, currently the world’s largest social media site, has over 750 million active users worldwide. However, once users have become enthralled in the world of Facebook, they are sensitive to any major changes that may potentially disrupt the experience.

Whenever Facebook decides to update or add a new feature to the site, the majority of users disapproves and complains. Throughout multiple changes, users have become increasingly disoriented, having to constantly adjust to Facebook’s whimsical nature. Instead of improving the site, Facebook’s attempted “updates” drive the company to increased customer dissatisfaction.

Recently, Facebook completely restructured its news feed, which is the list of recent friend activity on the home page. Previously, the news feed organized activity chronologically. Currently, Facebook ranks the incoming updates in order of importance and sorts them as top stories, recent stories, and Ticker stories.

Facebook launches the top stories to the forefront of the news feed where they remain until thwarted in importance by other posts. Other less popular information presents itself near the bottom as recent stories. Facebook then crams the rest of the information into Ticker, which is a small bar on the right side of the screen that continuously updates. Basically, Facebook took Twitter and compressed it to the length of a finger. If any friend does anything, it zooms to Twitt—I’m sorry, Ticker.

The primary concern with the new organization is the methodology behind the ranking of so-called importance. Most likely, the site uses a complex algorithm that factors in multiple variables and crunches out a top story. Despite all the technical talk, the stories feel arbitrarily chosen. Users have complained that a post with no activity surrounding it would end up as a top story when more popular ones would end up in the Ticker—only to be swallowed by the constant income of updates.

How can a post by Person A be any more important than a post by Person B if both have zero activity? How does Person A even end up at the top when he hasn’t been on Facebook for months? Millions of users have already voiced similar complaints over the Internet via status updates, blogs, and boards. Groups such as “We Hate the New Facebook” pop up with millions of members. In a poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal, 87% of voters stated that they are not happy with the new changes. They all want Facebook to do one more change: reverting to the previous format.

Of course, these protestors make up only a small percentage of the 750 million users on Facebook. Furthermore, people have a tendency to complain without actually doing anything about it. As Ben Pham¹² aptly put it, “Facebook is like America. People always complain, but they never move to Canada.” Similarly, are Facebook users planning to go back to MySpace? Sure, good luck “socializing” with that.

However, what makes this recent update much more interesting is the introduction of Google+, Google’s new social networking platform. Now, users may actually have a viable alternative to Facebook due to the way Google+ presents itself as fresh and “trendy.” Users can chat on Gmail while checking their profiles as well as engage in video chat “hangouts” with a group of friends. In addition, the Google juggernaut holds a tremendous amount of internet leverage.

Contrary to what it may believe, Facebook does not know the interests of every user. Providing what the customers want is the foundation of the relationship between producers and consumers. Ignoring the customers is like ignoring a girlfriend. It doesn’t work out so well. Likewise, too many unhappy customers will inevitably lead to failure. Netflix recently learned that the hard way. Will Facebook be next?

Tags: anthony, facebook, GSMST, opinion, tsou

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