by Shooting it to Put it Out of its Misery
JP Rangaswami does some musing on organisations and platforms. He likes airports; they are "open" and "multisided."
Well, Facebook is more like Hotel California.
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
’relax,’ said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!
For instance, a user profile has a mini-feed...which isn't a feed at all.
Send a user a message and they receive an email...which tells them they have a message waiting...in Facebook.
Facebook is not unique in this behaviour; in fact, it reminds folks of AOL.
Will we be getting Facebook Floppies in the mail? Probably not. Coasters that look like floppies? Maybe.
The AOL analogy does seem fitting. AOL was very, very popular with the non-tech crowd, and their parents...and grandparents - translated, everyone else but me and my 16550/A UART hunting, starting pppd via chat script, lynx using friends.
Facebook is a destination site for social networking. The F8 Platform appears very well thought-out and, above all, useful. So why polish the brass on the hollow-points? Because it could be more useful. Particularly to me and ~15,000 of my closest friends.
I want to tell folks to use it, but it is not good policy to tell folks -- our users -- to go create an account somewhere else to be able to participate in a core activity. Yeah, the adventurous colleagues signed-up for accounts and we are encouraging folks to enter the razor-wire wrapped FB pages, but encouragement only goes so far (so does telling for that matter :-)...
What would give me pause to put away the heavy artillery? Ah, i have a list! All good bloggers have a list.
Whew. That was tough. I'm tired now. I know i'm asking a lot, but its for the children!?!?
Feeds: Sorry FB friends, but i don't have the time to go to a site to get new information. While FB fires off an email when items are directed towards you, the "News Feed" info is stuck on the FB user home page.
The "News Feed" preferences are awesome. Just make the "News Feed" a feed?
OpenID: This may seem geeky, but it is of utmost importance to the user experience. Two scenarios for asking "User1876, go sign-up at Facebook."
Scenario 1: User must go create a new user account and receives yet another password after jumping thru the email validation process.
Scenario 2: User provides OpenID URL.
Yep, user doesn't have to remember yet another password and a valid email address can be handed off from the OpenID provider too (accepting that will earn you a cookie).
Which scenario would you wish on your grandmother? I have it on good authority that grandmothers love OpenID.
I would love to tell our users to use Facebook. We will be dabbling with some F8 integration with our apps; F8 made Facebook "multisided", but its still closed. Until FB opens up a few more gates, its gonna get the roach motel treatment from me.
I know O(10k) users ain't much in the big picture, but i think a lot of other users would be excited to see the changes too.
AOL eventually opened up...it had to...
But, I think it also says that there is still life in a portal strategy. ;) -- Jeremy Pepper
<sigh>
