When Better is Worse -- Thoughts on the Facebook Redesign

There is much to like about the new Facebook. It's much cleaner and has a more consistent information architecture that will give it room for future growth and innovation. Not to mention, it just plain looks better.

The bad news is that it feels fragmented. It's so easy to access information that it no longer feels like a community. The old site design was really focused on making it easy to find out what your friends were up to. There was basically one set of information that everyone in the group was looking it. In the new version, the additional information coming in is so great that it means everyone is now looking at a different set of info. This means that the newsfeed and recent changes are no longer an object of sociability. That is, because each person will be exploring different parts of the site there is less in common to talk about.

I think the new redesign may actually be a case of "better is worse" for this reason. Instead of having the feel of a unified stream of news to keep up to date with, the new site now feels like an encyclopedia to flip through when there's nothing better to do. Simply put, there's no longer the urgency to check it multiple times a day.

From Wired: "Joi Ito, founder of Neoteny, a venture firm, and former chair of Infoseek Japan, has joined a group of technologists advising Dean ... I contact him to ask if he thinks there's a difference between an emergent leader and an old-fashioned political opportunist. What does it take to lead a smart mob? Ito e-mails back an odd metaphor: "You're not a leader, you're a place. You're like a park or a garden. If it's comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not really about Dean. It's about us."

Facebook now feels less like a space and more like a resource. Less like a community, more like a product.

Less special, more average.

Comments

[Winstonian]

This is a very, very perceptive observation. I definitely think you are right. Unified community attention can create positive network affects. By breaking up information access into disparate areas of the site, Facebook is fracturing collective attention and minimizing the gains in value these network effects could create. Very good post.

[The Pageman]

I must agree. In marketing terms, there's too much "clutter"