23rd
It’s safe to say that Marc Tracy’s erstwhile digital avatar, declared dead this time last year, has finally bitten the digital dust. Because holy guacamole, the new version of thefacebook is bad.
Continuing to confuse novelty for improvement (see: AOL 6.0-infinity) and worshiping on some twisted altar of fragmentation, Zuckerberg and his goons continue to ruin what they lucked into by creating four separate panes for each profile. Some four-year old should come along and tell them that any mouse that ships without a scroll wheel ships broken. And any newborn should tell them the internet is about aggregating information, not splintering it to pieces. This won’t matter soon, once computers catch up to our realization that it’s not the documents that are interesting but the information they reference. But until thefacebook implements a search bar that takes you to precisely the piece of personal information you’re after (e.g., kate riley photos), the new design ensures we have to wade through a lot of nonsense to get where we’re going.
This problem manifests in a particular fashion on thefacebook, whose users often don’t even know where they want to go. As when visiting other sites (like this one), we mostly want to see what’s changed in the hour since our last visit. But unlike tumble logs, twitter, flickr, and Gawker, social network sites like thefacebook were never constructed to put the most recent change above the fold. Updates are shelved categorically rather than chronologically—images here, favorites there, groups yet elsewhere. To find them on the new version of thefacebook (and, dishearteningly, new.thefacebook.com generates a page load error), you have two choices: rabidly follow your newsfeed or browse through a litany of pages. These are not good options for users. But they mean great things for the eventual share price, and here’s why.
If you take the first way out, thefacebook is your IE homepage. Your constant visits ensure a constant stream of ad revenue.
If you take the second way out—as all casual visitors will have to, and many frequent visitors do when bored—you now have to hit four pages (Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes) to see the complete profile. Each time you navigate to a new “subprofile” page, facebook reloads the ads. From a latency perspective—like the user’s—this is inexcusable; the right ad pane should be frozen just as the left profile picture and network pane is. But from a revenue perspective—like the software engineer’s—this is brilliant (and, I suspect, the motive force for the entire redesign): To view someone’s entire profile, visitors must now suffer at least four times as many pleading endorsements of crassly lackluster t-shirt slogans. (I say at least because some pages display two ads, and won’t go into the extended argument about how this would all be a book if thefacebook targeted its ads properly and displayed, say,flights from your current location to your home town at Christmas or links to the iTunes store pages of your friends’ favorite artists.) Your browsing pattern ensures a constant stream of as revenue.
Most current, habitual users will choose the first option (most have already, really). But the new integration of the mini-feed, status bar, and wall gives the reluctant yet another reason to set their homepage to facebook rather than twitter and the like: Zuckerberg is working more and more to cash in on that model rather than his original one. The default profile page—the one you have to see every time you check up on a friend—is the new wall. (Remember yesterday, when this was buried all the way down at the bottom? The beginning, when it didn’t exist?) Combining the features it does, the Great Wall begins to replicate the functionality offered by twitter. It posts your new friends, your photo comments, your status, and others’ messages @you. Best of all, it’s passive; the same as twittering “I’m friends with Alex now!” except you can’t even choose not to. Perverse.
Thefacebook has chosen to do away with the static content that originally typified it. It no longer asks, “What are you like?” but “What are you doing?” (Think how much James Wood would loathe that! Flat caricatures constantly vibrating!) Excited as it is, the site, which has nixed the network page and marginalized the groups, can barely spare breath to ask who you are doing it with. Because what can the answer matter when everyone knows what you do?
