Wow, this Facebook Newsfeed is really cool!
September 8, 2006 08:38 PM
The irony of the lashback against Facebook's News Feed and Mini-feed is that most people wouldn't know about the "Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)" group if it weren't for seeing it in their friend's mini-feeds.
If you really have a problem with the feeds, I dare you to ignore them when you login to Facebook or look at people's profiles.
Kinda hard, ain't it?
What's interesting about all this is that it's predictable in the field I work in: if you make dramatic changes on a site, even if they're good or seemingly inocuous, people WILL complain in droves. When eBay changed their background color from yellow to white a while back, tons of users complained. When they made the same change gradually a little later, almost no one did.* It would be interesting to see if there would be nearly as many complaints if Facebook had opted for a tiered, gradual introduction of the feed features.
Facebook's mistake was not in the widgets they introduced, it was a slip in execution and delivery. Their quick, sincere apology and rapid, introduction of privacy features showed that they can execute in a tight spot. Good for them.
And what do I personally think about the newsfeed? I think it's a great idea, but I don't like how it clutters up my profile page after I went to all this trouble of cleaning it up. And I'm bitter that it dates my parody MySpace profile.
* Culled that example from a great article on major relaunches and iterative design - The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch.
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