I was listening/watching the live feed from Thursday's f8 conference, and I was genuinely impressed with both the new Timeline and Open Graph applications - so when I popped on over to my Twitter feed and read the sheer number of paranoid people throwing fits about the change, I was actually surprised.
Except for Andy Samburg's lame opening act, what unfolded onstage that day was pure genius - and I think most people will eventually agree - even if it takes a little more time for some people to see it than others.
People are naturally resistant to change - I get that - but the internet is an ever-changing entity. It has to be, in order to stay relevant these days. We can try and try to maintain consistency in some parts of our lives, but the internet is, and always will be, an arena in which those efforts will fail.
Thursday night I unlocked the developer preview on my own Facebook profile and set out to prove why the naysayers - screaming the death of Facebook, a mass exodus to Google+ and the end of privacy online - don't know what they're talking about. Today, I noticed people are a little more positive about the whole thing. I suspect they're actually unlocking their own profiles and seeing for themselves that change isn't all bad. So here are my initial thoughts after playing around a bit:
Timeline is Going to Be a HUGE Time Suck - At Least At First...
The first thing I did when I unlocked my timeline was scroll back to 2005 to see who was posting what on my profile back in the early days of Facebook. So far, I've only removed a few of those things from my timeline, but I may hide a lot more in the long run. Not because I want to hide that content, but because it doesn't fit into the new timeline setup, my profile as the story of my life. They're from an earlier day, and a much different version of Facebook.
See, back then, it was a college-only website, and there were no "status updates." There was only a profile, limited pictures, and a "wall" that served the same purpose as the dry-erase board on my dorm room door, where people could leave me messages. Later, they added the status update - only it was in the form of a sentence "Laura Griffith is ________", during which time all my updates were "-ing" phrases. Those were all good and fine then, but how do they fit into the story of me? Some do, and some don't.
Furthermore, I understand there are some bugs right now, but lots of my photos are out of order, and I feel the need to fix them. Long ago, I hit Facebook's album quota (which I'm not sure exists anymore) and deleted lots of photos only to reload them in "Best of" collections. Now they're showing on my timeline where I re-uploaded them and not where they were taken, which is unfortunate.
As Mark Zuckerberg said at f8, people feel a strong sense of propriety over their personal profiles, a statement that has never been more true than it's about to be thanks to timeline. I suspect I won't be the only one taking the time (and it's going to be a lot) to go through my old posts, and load new ones along my timeline to "curate" the story of me, exactly the way I want it.
Prediction: People will be more careful about what they're posting. Or they should be. Moving forward, I'm going to be asking myself this before every post: "Does this fit into the story of my life, or is it just meaningless b.s. I'll want to hide later?" This should weed out a lot of posts (though not all I'm sure) about people's infants' bowel movements. I hope anyway. Too long, people (including myself) have posted too much nonsense and used Facebook as more of a broadcasting tool than anything else - but they've lost track of the whole point, which is the personal profile. Facebook was built for PERSONAL interaction - that's why it was so exclusive in the beginning. I think it's just getting back to its roots, in a good way.
People will LOVE Timeline, because they love to talk about themselves. The whole point of going through my profile and "curating it" the way I want is so that it will be a better reflection of me - like a resume, only with my personal likes and dislikes, etc. Whether my audience is me or people who know me can be controlled using the new privacy options (I'll get to that later). People, by nature, enjoy talking about themselves - or at least thinking other people care about what we're doing, who we are, and what we care about. The Facebook profile is just a less annoying way of tooting your own horn - and the best part is it's perfectly socially acceptable, unlike bragging into a megaphone - but almost as effective.
People will LOVE Timeline, because they love to talk about themselves. The whole point of going through my profile and "curating it" the way I want is so that it will be a better reflection of me - like a resume, only with my personal likes and dislikes, etc. Whether my audience is me or people who know me can be controlled using the new privacy options (I'll get to that later). People, by nature, enjoy talking about themselves - or at least thinking other people care about what we're doing, who we are, and what we care about. The Facebook profile is just a less annoying way of tooting your own horn - and the best part is it's perfectly socially acceptable, unlike bragging into a megaphone - but almost as effective.
More than that, Facebook is a museum of people. My friend mentioned the other day that her girlfriend's husband kept her Facebook page running after she died so that the people who knew her could see pictures of her, thoughts and interests that she had shared, and more. The whole concept of timeline makes that even more interesting because now, with her password, he could potentially go in and organize her entire life on that one profile page by adding photos and milestones and letting her own previous content fill in the rest. Instead of seeing only what she posted shortly before she died, friends could share memories from throughout her entire life on that one profile page.
Sound like a lot? Don't be paranoid. The new Timeline has MORE, not fewer, privacy controls. The privacy controls and circles that Google+ launched with (and Facebook used to not have) are now on Facebook as well in the form of lists. Users can control a separate privacy setting for each post as they make it, and share with specific groups rather than the catch all, Facebook classic "friends." On the timeline, each post from your past can also be hidden, left alone or featured individually. You can be as private or as public as you want to be, and you can make that call from post to post.
Realtime feed is news feed 2.0! Same deal, new look. One of the funniest things I stumbled upon when I unlocked my FB past was a note I wrote in 2006 when News Feed first came out. People were freaking out that this information was being pushed out to friends' home pages, even though that same information had always been available to friends who came looking for it. Last week, when I so rabidly defended Facebook (not because I care, but because it seemed like people were being ignorant about change like they were with news feed, which they eventually grew to love), it was total deja vu.
Realtime is the news feed - in real time (or Twitter, as some people call it). It takes some of the less significant/more time sensitive activity (so and so signed someone's wall; so and so changed their profile pic; so and so is listening to... etc. ) out of the timeline, where it would previously have sat and become old news. I noticed that my profile no longer lists every time I comment on someone's post or when I like something new. Instead, those activity updates run through real time and filter out before too many people even see them, which is fine with me. Those posts always clogged up my old profile and have no real place (except when grouped) on my new timeline as far as I'm concerned.
Realtime is the news feed - in real time (or Twitter, as some people call it). It takes some of the less significant/more time sensitive activity (so and so signed someone's wall; so and so changed their profile pic; so and so is listening to... etc. ) out of the timeline, where it would previously have sat and become old news. I noticed that my profile no longer lists every time I comment on someone's post or when I like something new. Instead, those activity updates run through real time and filter out before too many people even see them, which is fine with me. Those posts always clogged up my old profile and have no real place (except when grouped) on my new timeline as far as I'm concerned.
Top news stories aren't new, and recent stories aren't gone! They just look different. I don't like top stories either - I always clicked "most recent" before. If you are the same as me, there's good news! Even though more emphasis has been placed on "top stories" recently, the "most recent" functionality is not gone. Instead of tabs, it's just a link you click now, that will take you further down your homepage to recent stories rather than to another view of the homepage.
I do think the idea of top stories is cool, if they can get it right. Clicking and unclicking stories in the meantime to let Facebook know what's interesting and what isn't is kind of a pain in the butt, but it's not at all different from what Pandora does with songs it plays on its custom radio stations. (If you mark that you hate it, they won't play it. If you mark that you love it, they'll play it more often along with other songs like it. It's a learning process.) One day I hope top stories can actually show me what I want to see so I don't have to wade through 600+ friends' and pages' updates to read the good stuff.
I do think the idea of top stories is cool, if they can get it right. Clicking and unclicking stories in the meantime to let Facebook know what's interesting and what isn't is kind of a pain in the butt, but it's not at all different from what Pandora does with songs it plays on its custom radio stations. (If you mark that you hate it, they won't play it. If you mark that you love it, they'll play it more often along with other songs like it. It's a learning process.) One day I hope top stories can actually show me what I want to see so I don't have to wade through 600+ friends' and pages' updates to read the good stuff.
Open Graph applications aren't stalkers - they're just better for us lazy people.
Personally, I like the idea of allowing an application to access my profile for posting whenever. I am one of those people who like to share anyway, which before required me to allow access every single time I wanted to post something, and a lot of manual posting. This way, I can give an app I like permission one time, and then it's out of my hands. I've done this already with Spotify. The great thing is that if I decide later that I don't want every song I listen to posted to my profile, I can revoke Spotify's access at any time. I plan to do the same with various running apps, entertainment apps, news apps and more. They'll make my profile look cleaner in the long run, and my content will be better organized. And then one day I can look back at 2011 and see what I was listening to/doing/interested in then.
G+ doesn't stand a chance. Except for Hangouts, which I still think would be cool if everyone had a webcam (and you'd be surprised how many people nowadays don't), Facebook now has everything G+ does - not to mention the fact that people have networks on FB with hundreds upon hundreds of people and pages that they would have to completely rebuild if they migrated over. This is not to say no one will migrate, but I'm guessing that as long as Facebook keeps up with the times (and since they've been a leader up through this point I'd say they're in good shape in that area), and doesn't grow stale like MySpace, Facebook won't be going anywhere anytime soon.
Those are some initial thoughts... I'm sure I'll have more as I play with this and learn the ropes. Anyone else have the new profile yet? Anyone have any thoughts on the issue?
Mostly, I love that they're going back to the root of the social network - the personal focus - along with the new, impressive imagery and clean layout, and the way the application content looks on the timeline (see Spotify in my screen shot above). It looks very modern, and it's so easy to have everything you love all in one place.
G+ doesn't stand a chance. Except for Hangouts, which I still think would be cool if everyone had a webcam (and you'd be surprised how many people nowadays don't), Facebook now has everything G+ does - not to mention the fact that people have networks on FB with hundreds upon hundreds of people and pages that they would have to completely rebuild if they migrated over. This is not to say no one will migrate, but I'm guessing that as long as Facebook keeps up with the times (and since they've been a leader up through this point I'd say they're in good shape in that area), and doesn't grow stale like MySpace, Facebook won't be going anywhere anytime soon.
Those are some initial thoughts... I'm sure I'll have more as I play with this and learn the ropes. Anyone else have the new profile yet? Anyone have any thoughts on the issue?
Mostly, I love that they're going back to the root of the social network - the personal focus - along with the new, impressive imagery and clean layout, and the way the application content looks on the timeline (see Spotify in my screen shot above). It looks very modern, and it's so easy to have everything you love all in one place.
