Posts tagged facebook
On Facebook Timeline: Teaching Data to Speak Humanely
Yesterday, Facebook unveiled their new “Timeline” design. Largely imagined by Sam Lessin and Nicholas Feltron, the design coaxes personal actions recorded by Facebook into a humane, emotional, interface for a given history1. Users can delve into their content not as images, notes, and actions, but in a timeline interface that is more natural for humans.
After exploring the interface last night, I believe Timeline represents an important shift in social networking, one which refactors the technology’s interface to a language used prior to its introduction. Every significant mass technology evolves in a similar way, graduating to a form so natural and intuitive that cultural theorist Stuart Hall refers to this quality as “of courseness”.
The shift Timeline instigates is similar to that brought on by the iPod, which arranged MP3 files by artist and album instead of adopting the folder hierarchy navigation used by existing devices. The old players, much like the old Facebook, presented information in a way the filesystems or databases viewed it. Apple refactored this data back into a familiar interface; one more similar to the ways humans interacted with the same language prior to it’s digital translation. The iPod turned files back into songs, the Macintosh turned the monitor back into a desktop, and Timeline is turing posts back into a stories2.
This refactoring of digital tools back into the language of the process it was designed to improve is a constant theme within the last half century of consumer technology. The push/pull between tech advancement and mass user comprehension see-saws back and forth towards an optimized future.
Eventually, technology and its design advance far enough to disappear leaving only the content behind. For example, our children will never know that there was once media dedicated to the deliver of music. To them a song or album will play on any device, regardless of service or OS. Playing a tape, CD, or LP is a wasted step. They will just play songs3.
In a nutshell, we can descripte this process as such: technology eventually divorces content from a specific medium. Content becomes not formless but form agnostic, with the ability to live wherever a human might want it.
Consider weather content. For decades it lived in the world as a ‘weather report.’ Its presense was conditional on a specific medium being present, like a local news show, newspaper, or almanac. Each of these media fit conditions that weather required: they were local and daily in occurance (at least). Fast forward to now: weather is on every device with an internet connection. My game console, phone, website, billboard, and elevator screen tell me the weather. Searching for local weather on Google doesn’t even require advancing to a page as Google just plops it in the results. The Weather Report is gone, replacing it is simply ‘Weather,’ the one thing humans cared about in the first place. Ubiquitous technology divorced weather from the report and seeded it everywhere we wanted it.
But weather and music are relatively simple. They’re portable and their general usage is relatively predicatable. But what of Facebook? How can you refactor social networks so their native tongue is human (not technological) and their content is divorced from any specific form? Massaging a dataset into a a proxy for life and relationships is a massive challenge.
Timeline takes a very good step towards a human interface. Open Graph asks developers to carefully specify the nouns and verbs of their actions so Facebook can present an update as a story. “Drew is listening to R.E.M” is much more natural than “Drew shared a link: R.E.M.” Additionally, these stories aren’t captured on a wall (which has no pre-Facebook counterpart), they’re captured on a timeline (which has many pre-Facebook counterparts4). Timeline also takes a solid step towards form-agnostic design. Its two-column interface suggests usage on a tablet or browser, and a condensed one-column view on a smartphone.
Timeline isn’t perfect, but it’s an amazing accomplishment. Exploring your life with the year navigation controls is an emotional, reflective experience. For the first time in years, Timeline made me wish I had captured more stories with Facebook. And I’m sure that’s exactly Facebook’s intent.
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My thoughts concerning what Timeline means for Facebook’s social media model can be found here. ↩
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According to the Insights API, the base unit of a personal event is a ‘story’. ↩
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My favorite example of this trope is the telephone, which functionally began as the telegraph. Using Morse Code, the telegraph was unusable by the mass public without the aide of an expert. As the telegraph gained in poplarity, telegraph machines were invented with more human interfaces in an attempt to democratize the technology. Despite these efforts, mass electronic communication didn’t take off among the general public until the introduction of the telephone, which refactored the mode of dialogue back into the pre-telegraph ‘conversation’. Even now, we’re still adjusting this interface towards a point where the interface itself isn’t perceptable: with cellphones’ built-in address books, we no longer call numbers. Now we call people, much like our children will only play songs. ↩
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Photoalbums, wall charts that track children’s height, yearbooks (Facebook’s initial, successful metaphor), journals, scrapbooks… ↩
Facebook in Africa
How Facebook prioritizes Africa:
Three companies will dominate digital Africa for the next decade. The first is Facebook. This social network, born at Harvard and based in Palo Alto, California, is not just a skin on internet-enabled African mobiles, it is the skin. Pricing is driving its popularity. The site was zero-rated in 2010—that is, made almost free of data charges in several African markets (the bill is footed by Facebook, the network operators and the phone manufacturers). “The zero-rating of Facebook was the most significant tech story in Africa in 2010,” says Erik Hersman, who has two influential blogs, White African and Afrigadget. So while text messages are cheap, sitting on Facebook is even cheaper. Facebook’s own numbers show growth coming fastest in Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.
(Via The Economists’ More Intelligent Life)
“ I found and created a Tumblr account.”
Business Insider points to comments section of Sheryl Sandberg’s blog post addressing the role of advertising on Facebook. Advertisers take note: these are the people you’re paying to reach.
* It took a lot of effort not to pick apart Sandberg’s piece and the Facebook/Google party line that advertising improves user experience. A screed for another time…
Kodak Is Bringing Facebook to CVS
Soon, you’ll be able to log into your Facebook account at Kodak’s retail photo-printing kiosks in stores like CVS and Target to print photos.
I’m sure this will go smoothly and not have any privacy problems at all! (Via NYTimes)
The Coming Social Gaming Reckoning
Zynga just lost 10% of its gamers… Facebook’s changes in notifications and requests, which eliminated a significant amount of free advertising enjoyed by social gaming applications, had a major negative impact on Zynga and most of the other major social gaming companies
Social gaming success stories so far have focused on fast-growing, derivative game makers like Zynga, Playfish, et al. While these companies have enjoyed huge, engaged audiences, I cannot believe that their growth will continue. Their games are devoid of substance and ‘hack’ social interactions online. As users become accustomed to their digital lives, the pressure to tend to a virtual farm will be lessened.
Despite critical reception, Facebook’s interface changes are always very smart. They’re designed to generate more substation engagement and reduce friction. Facebook puts the user at the center.
Zynga and others take advantage of the current inefficiencies of the network. They rely on feed-bombing, compulsive network-checking, and accidental notification-blasts. These days are coming to an end, both because of the networks and user acclimation. There will be a huge opportunity for social gaming of substance, once the noise from these start-ups subsides. (Data via Business Insider)
“ What lessons can we draw from the Facebook flameup? Lifecycle changes can trump generational change and cultural values perceived as crucial at the age of 13 can be very different at 20. A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs.”
Bruce Nussbaum.
Perfectly said. I haven’t seen this observation yet: digital change spurred cultural change at a rate faster than lifestage change. In doing so, we tripped up when the digital generation became adults, undoing some of the cultural trends bleeding-edge companies had been banking on. Fascinating. (Via Harvard Business Review)
What is this?
This site randomly displays the private phone numbers of unsuspecting Facebook users.
How does it work?
There are uncountable numbers of groups on Facebook called “lost my phone!!!!! need ur numbers!!!!!” or something like that. Most of them are marked as ‘public’, or ‘visible to everyone’. A lot of folks don’t understand what that means in Facebook’s context — to Facebook, ‘everyone’ means everyone in the world, whether they’re a Facebook member or not. That includes automated programs like Evil, as well as search engines.
(Via Tom Scott, Via Huffington Post)
Virtual States
Over the last decade, tech journalists leaned heavily on certain device: comparing virtual communities to ‘brick & mortar’ states. For example:
- “If Second Life were a physical country, it would be larger than Hong Kong, Singapore, and many Caribbean islands.” (Link)
- “With more than 400 million active users worldwide and rising fast, Facebook would be the third most populated country behind leaders China (1.33 billion) and India (1.17 billion).” (Link)
This device was once seated firmly in the land of metaphors. But this week, a trend is taking shape wherein virtual communities are acting increasingly like nation states. To wit:
- Google is butting heads with China and lobbying for US action on their behalf.
- Facebook is gearing up to issue their own currency.
- Wikileaks’ open-source spycraft is causing government anxiety (and, allegedly, counter-measures)
While not really in the same category, Apple is meeting with the US military to discuss future combat.
Odd, no? What would a sovereign network look like?
175 Million People Log Into Facebook Every Day
To put that into perspective: only 5 countries have populations larger than Facebook’s daily uniques. (China, India, US, Indonesia, Brazil)
