Kellan Elliott-McCrea, who knows about the difficulties involved in getting large-scale social services to play nice, wrote some of the first insightful things I’ve seen about the recent Facebook redesign.
[In contrast to Twitter, Facebook] specifically designed a page that was lossy. They said, “You don’t want to see everything, here is a subset of things your friends do we think you’ll be interested in.” And so you knew that you weren’t seeing everything, it wasn’t that they were failing their contract with you, but that they had decided not to show you something for editorial reasons. And you knew that if you wanted to see everything you had to dig, because that was the contract. And that digging was scoped to a user, your wall or your friends wall, data scoped by data owner — super cheap look up.
The punchline, and why we, and all our friends are complaining, is that the new Facebook page makes a promise it can’t keep.
I’ve reactivated my Facebook account, for the reason that I’ve been able to get back in touch with a lot of high school and college friends through it. Google-rank is not useful because you’re not going to find what’s-their-name-who-always-made-your-homeroom-crack-up, while Facebook’s set up to use your network of friends to set up that reintroduction.
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