Rory Marinich

Not long ago, Nick wrote about FriendFeed, which makes a feed out of various internet sites similar to the way Facebook creates feeds out of its applications. He suggested that it was possibly a shoe-in for Google’s continuing efforts to create an expansive, completely open social network. Yesterday, I was sent a beta test invitation for FriendFeed, and I spent a few hours today playing around with it.

FriendFeed does what it attempts very well. I was quickly able to add things from sites like Last.fm and Google Reader’s Shared items, and they began broadcasting quickly along feeds. I was also able to see a page with my friends’ feeds, which worked well, and gave me a nice idea of what they were up to. The site’s design actually reminded me of Facebook first, in that it is not AJAX-intensive, but manages to streamline everything in a way that’s intuitive and quick. If this is in fact Google’s attempt at creating a feed, it’s a very well-done one; if not, it’s a great service in its own right.

But does it compare to Facebook’s feed? In a word: no. While it is a very useful service, and one that makes public information broadcasting very easy, it’s not anything nearly as personalized and functional as Facebook’s service.

First, Facebook is designed to be very personalized. I see my friends doing things on the site, and there are enough people on Facebook to make my feed meaningful to me. Facebook’s algorithms are well-designed and show me more information from people I’m friends with than with people I don’t know as well. As far as I could see, FriendFeed does not currently have that sort of personalization.

Another thing Facebook can do is this: it provides varying levels of interactivity. If my friend comments on a photo, I’m less likely to see it than if that same person posted an album. If I’m tagged in that album, I almost always get a feed notification. FriendFeed only offers one feed per site, which leads to an imbalanced feed. This might not last – many sites offer multiple feeds for various things, which could be used to create a more weighted stream – but for now, Facebook reigns supreme for personalization.

FriendFeed doesn’t control the content it’s drawing from, which makes things difficult. On Facebook, I can comment on something in my feed and it goes through back to the original content. On FriendFeed, comments will no doubt only show on Friendfeed, making it less useful and slightly more unwieldy as a centralized tool.

Finally, and most importantly, Facebook is a closed service. While I am a staunch supporter of open formats such as OpenID and RSS, a closed system like Facebook is able to simplify things immensely for its users. I don’t need to aggregate Flickr and YouTube for the majority of my friends, when I can just add Facebook’s photo and video applications. They automatically show up in my feed, and I can access them from one place.With FriendFeed, I can see a variety of programs. I cannot use them from FriendFeed itself, however. Facebook offers centralization, which is a huge draw for most. Also, Facebook’s viral portion – that of advertising new applications – loses value on FriendFeed, when the applications being added are plain RSS feeds from common sites. (In any event, alerts to new feeds added have not been evident to me so far.)

Conclusion
Is FriendFeed a bad service? Not by any means. Though I haven’t used it for long, it’s simple enough and powerful enough for me to imagine it being my one feed generator to link to in profiles and blogs. However, it is by no means as powerful a tool as Facebook’s feed generator. If FriendFeed is aiming to be a standalone site, then it succeeds marvelously. (It would do better, of course, if it allowed Shared Items from Facebook – that goes without saying.) If it really is attempting to be Google’s answer to Facebook’s feeds, though, it requires a much more integrated interface to even start to compete.

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For those of you that don’t know, Twitter is a microblogging site. This means that it allows users to write very short text posts, alerting their friends to what they’re doing. Users can update their status from cell phones, or they can write a short blurb on Twitter’s web site.

This sounds very similar, in ways, to Facebook’s status updates. It’s a way for friends to show what they’re doing to other friends. The only difference, of course, if that Facebook prefaces every message with a “[username] is” title, making posting less flexible than on Twitter.

Is this a direct competitor to Twitter? No. (Although, however, Twitter does have a Facebook application of its own.) I started using a service similar to Twitter a week ago, and I love just how interactive a stream of notes can be, and how addictive it is. Facebook’s status messages have never made me interested in posting my status.

Changing this would be easy for Facebook: there isn’t much stopping them from removing the “user is” in front of a message and creating an interface that really lets people use status to interact. (For good measure, they could also throw in a status RSS feed, which has currently been sorely lacking.)

However: would it be a smart move for Facebook? They emphasize interaction through using their built-in applications. Why bother using status when you can write a wall? Why built interactive back-and-forth miniblogs when you’re able to just write on walls?

The answer: it’s much easier to do that way. But Facebook isn’t about making it easy to chat quickly back-and-forth. They’re focused on making their web site into a social utility, where it’s possible to work efficiently without any spam and nonsense showing up. Twitter-like statuses would be nice. But it is far from being essential, or even useful.

Beyond Facebook, there are several other sites I use frequently. Google, obviously, is necessary for when I want to search and email other people. Last.fm has slowly become my choice for listening to music and finding new bands. And recently, I joined Streamy for reading newsfeeds. These sites are all networks: usually, Last.fm is the only place I need to go to for music information. And I’ve never had to resort to a search engine past Google for most of my general needs.

There are some networks I don’t feel the need for anymore, however. For instance, when I feel the need to talk with moviegoers, I don’t use a specific web site: I just use the Flixster app on Facebook. It’s a full-fledged movie network, and it integrates perfectly with my already-existing profile. Similarly, whereas I once used a set of sites to find music online, now I just use Skreemr.com‘s app to find and save songs. That’s not quite a network, but it’s a full new set of functionality for Facebook. The same goes for Box.net‘s Files application, which has replaced my need to use the original Box site at all.

Rather than trying to be a network encompassing certain features – photos, events, groups – Facebook has turned itself into a directory of features – their apps. By letting sites use their features on Facebook’s main site itself, it turns Facebook into more than a social network: it makes it a network of other networks, all co-existing with each other.

Of course, this isn’t a given: Last.fm has an application on Facebook, but it’s nowhere near the equivalent of using Last.fm’s web site itself. It’s up to the company to decide whether or not it wants to truly integrate itself with Facebook. Either choice has its advantages and drawbacks. Integrate with Facebook, and a smaller network is capable of gaining a much larger casual userbase than it might be able to attract otherwise. However, Facebook puts severe design limitations on companies that try to release their products. It’s hard to imagine a site like Digg looking nearly as good on Facebook as it does right now.

A few days ago, I was talking with Pete Zafonte, owner of game and proxy designing company Etnofaz, about Facebook’s new activity-monitoring system of application development. His view: that activity is just as misleading a statistic as total number of users. Take the Vampire and Werewolve applications: while both encourage daily usage, both still rely entirely on drawing in new users without providing any sort of new functionality. Pete presented this (admittedly rough) metric for determining application value:

Clean interface
There are many well-designed Facebook applications that fail because users can’t understand quite how to use it. Every application should be clean enough for users to be able to figure things out. Look at Facebook’s own applications as guiding points: each presents current goings-on in their systems on the front page, but on the top-right of each application is a quick way to utilize each app: Write Note, Upload Photos, Share an Item. It’s easy, and it gets used a lot. If things are too hard to use, they won’t get used.

Object-oriented
By object-oriented, this guide refers to applications that are based around objects that the applications itself creates, not simply user profiles. This is another guideline that most current popular applications use: iLike’s application creates separate pages for individual artists with discussion walls and songs, and Flixter’s movie application creates pages for movies. Less favorable by this system would be add-on walls or systems like X Me, which go directly from user to user without any center meeting point in between: while applications like this are good for friend-to-friend interaction, there’s not much chance that users can extend their networks and find new people using applications like this.

Innovation (of new ideas or existing ideas)
This one’s really just an attack on some of the copycat applications that have been springing up. Users don’t need four extra walls, two more poking systems, and five music players. It’s usually a better idea for applications to develop new, unmarketed concepts in Facebook than it is for them to just rip off old ideas and hope things turn out okay.

Interoperates with Facebook or other Applications
Interoperating with Facebook right now means one of a few things: allowing for user tags (like Notes, Photos and Videos), allowing Wall Posts (Box.net’s Files application, for instance, makes sharing files via messaging a snap: yet another thing I’ve noticed is done more and more on Facebook and less via emailing), or through broadcasting useful Notifications (using Flixter’s app, for instance, I get quite a lot of nice feedback on ongoing movies).

There’s not much interapplication work going on right now, which is unfortunate. If applications ever figure out how to communicate back-and-forth with one another efficiently, the possibilities for a truly broad application network could be enormous.

Broad Audience (as much as possible at least)
If Facebook is promoting applications, it only makes sense that they promote ones that are the most useful to the most people. Facebook’s current system does this quite well, but this is on the list as a reminder that very efficient applications don’t make for the best applications if they’re very obscure.

The Etnofaz application guide will probably never be anything that Facebook could base a system off of: it’s too hard to measure through statistics, and it’s too slow to really encompass all the applications that are out there. It is, however, of enormous benefit to application developers: each of these guidelines is extremely useful for people trying to create the next big application out there.

A friend of mine recently posted a note on Facebook explaining why he still chooses to keep a blog for his Facebook friends, rather than just communicate with them via notes. Beyond the most obvious explanation – Facebook is closed to non-members – he offered this as a defense:

“Facebook’s lack of a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor makes composing my blog posts much more difficult. On Blogger [Google's blogging platform], a single button makes whatever I have highlighted bold. Another button adds a link. Another inserts a picture. Facebook’s system is too complex for simple expression.”

WYSIWYG editors are commonplace on social networks. MySpace offers one for its blogs, for instance. Every common online forum package offers an editor of some sort. Why, then, doesn’t Facebook simply create one and satisfy its users?

The answer lies, perhaps, in another part of Facebook’s messaging system: its Walls. Facebook’s wall system is fairly advanced for a social network: while HTML isn’t allowed, posters can add pictures, music or videos using Facebook’s Share method, or they can attach content from any of Facebook’s applications. Despite this, Facebook strives to maintain a simplistic layout for their walls, as can be seen here:

While this message comes with a video atttached, the box itself stays relatively minimal and compact. Clicking the video attachment will open an embedded player underneath the message. The post itself can’t be modified in any way: only plain text can be added.

Here, however, is a sample post from Facebook’s Advanced Wall application, which allows for WYSIWYG posting on a separate space:

Ignoring the annoying advertisement at the bottom, this post is still a much more gaudy, excessive one than the simple wall post above. Font sizes change, colors are edited, and images are added. (Videos posted would appear without a thumbnail: the player would appear without prompting.) Is it more “expressive?” Perhaps. However, Advanced Wall posts take up much more space, and are much more eye-catching, than Wall posts are.

On a site like MySpace, which lets its users run basically amok, HTML editting like the above post might not seem out of place. Facebook, however, has built its entire service around understatement, minimalism. Users can’t change its page layout, add images – beyond photos – or really change the workings of Facebook’s default Information block system. Wall posts aren’t meant to be fun or eye-catching: they’re meant to be messages, plain and simple.

Notes are really the only self-expression any user needs: nowhere else is HTML formatting really necessary for basic communication. Writing notes, however – especially longer notes – sometimes requires slightly more complex formatting.

Notes, however, appear in users’ feeds when they are written. Allowing very easy formattion via notes would lead to possibilities of cluttered, unwieldy feeds. So, Facebook makes formatting slightly harder than the norm for notes. Rather than including a WYSIWYG for instant gratification, they merely allow formatting, and include a link to standard HTML formatting tags.

Why is this an advantage? Simple: it means that for users who really want to stylize their note, or for users who already know what they are doing, formatting isn’t hard at all. At the same time, they add a slight learning curve to formatting, so casual, inexperienced users don’t go overboard with their styling.

Sometimes, as in the case of Facebook’s notes, keeping a feature out means keeping away a lot of clutter in the meantime.

The blog Uncov had an article this weekend about spam showing up in Facebook’s poll system, mocking Facebook as a site that foolishly let people pay for polls rather than advertisements to have them show up more prominently on a user’s page. Today, the first such poll found its way onto my page, and it seemed to be the exact same sort of spam:

The problem with allowing anybody to poll Facebook users is this: done correctly, it lets surveyors quickly assess a variety of people, for pinpoint researching. If abused, however, it just serves to more users complaining about the poll system, which is never a good thing for Facebook.

This could be a problem, considering there aren’t quick solutions to the spam. Facebook could introduce a filter for URLs, but that would lead to quick, obvious circumventions of the filter, just as happens in email spam. They could moderate every poll before release, but that would slow down the system considerably. There’s not much chance that they will drop their poll system entirely: it’s too well-placed for Facebook to get rid of.

On the bright side, this sort of spam is less intrusive than random friend requests and messages, like the kind MySpace has. On the downside, this makes Facebook’s feeds seem even more unreliable for users.

In the last week or so, Facebook gave its users the ability to edit basic profile information from within their own profiles, making users’ profiles even more accessible as a basic Facebook “control panel.”

Currently, only personal information is handled this way. Editing fields show up fairly quickly, and saved changes appear on the profile in seconds. It’s interesting that Facebook doesn’t even add a Save button to the mix; it fits in perfectly, however, with the site’s uncluttered design.

Is this a groundbreaking feature on Facebook? Not really. But it goes to show that Facebook is not slacking off on the job: they’re constantly tweaking their site design to make it more intuitive for their users.

(A similar little tweak, albeit one that has been around for a while, is this: hover your mouse over the “more” link for your applications, and it will expand your menu without a click. Click outside the box, and it will vanish again. Not extremely useful, but still a neat little bit.)