New Facebook Flaw?

Posted in Uncategorized on September 12th, 2008

Facebook has been a social networking giant in recent years. Born from Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard, Facebook now has over 132 million unique users each month. The company’s value has been set at $15 billion by Microsoft. The site has had positive growth since it’s conception and is the ‘It’ company in Silicon Valley. They’ve done this with a simple, easy to use interface and enough bandwidth to make using their site quick and hassle free. Throughout the years, Facebook has tweaked their original design and features several times. This in an effort to revitalize the site and continually make it a better site for it’s expanding user base. At first, all new changes are greeted by boos, which usually go silent once the community becomes accustomed to the changes. However, I think their latest design may have a slight flaw.

Facebook appeals to advertisers because their predominantly college aged users, their high volume of users, and the amount of information that users readily give out on their Facebook profiles. Facebook can keep track of how many users enjoy what types of music, movies, books, and other personal information. This is valuable information for advertisers and marketers. In an attempt to capitalize financially, Facebook launched B eacon. It was a social advertising attempt to connect businesses with the information that Facebook users dispensed via their profiles. Beacon was a valiant effort, but an idea that ultimately needed more planning before it’s implementation.

If Facebook wants to continue down the path they started with Beacon, their new design may hinder this vision. Above you can see the old Facebook layout (minus my picture) and below you can see the new format. The distinct difference is that on the old Facebook profile, all the vital information was displayed on the opening page where the new Facebook puts this information on a second tab (see tabs below my name), not directly in view of the user. I feel that this has decreased user’s interest in updating their personal information. Which means fewer updates and less accurate marketing statistics for Facebook to dispense. I as an avid user, know that I have updated my info less than before due to the simple tweak of the interface. If people can’t see the information right away, they are less apt to click to see it. We need that information to smack us in the face every time we log on and view someone’s page. Otherwise, we become too lazy to click and find this info that we probably don’t care about. It needs to be spoon fed to us.

The creators of Facebook and the people who are running the site are conceivably a bit smarter than I am and have more inside information readily available to them. Maybe this new Facebook hasn’t been detrimental to their ability to ascertain vital information and there is a method to their madness. However, as someone who uses many social networking platforms, I think that Facebook took the emphasis from the information on user’s profiles and more so on the applications that users can put on their profiles. Thus, their goal of information and social ads platforms has been greatly comprimised.