Facebook's latest redesign which has been clearly inspired Twitter's real-time stream of status updates has had a ton of detractors from all corners. One of the biggest places where the outcry has centralized is the Facebook Layout vote application which currently has had over a million votes from Face book users with over 94% against the new changes and almost 600,000 comments, most of which seem to be negative if the hundred or so I read were a representative sample.

One thing I've wondered is how the folks at Facebook are taking this feedback. On the one hand, people don't like changes and the more disruptive the change the more they fight it. It's almost comical to go back and read the Time magazine article about the backlash against the news feed from back in 2006 given how much the feature has not only ended up defining Facebook but how significantly it has impacted the social software landscape at large.  On the other hand, sometimes people have a good reason to protest such as the outcry against the privacy destroying Facebook Beacon which eventually inspired a mea culpa from Zuckerburg himself.

Owen Thomas from Valleywag has an article entitled Even Facebook Employees Hate the Redesign which contains the following excerpt

The feedback on Facebook's new look, which emphasizes a stream of Twitter-like status updates, is almost universally, howlingly negative. Why isn't CEO Mark Zuckerberg listening to users? Because he doesn't have to, he's told employees.

A tipster tells us that Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff reacting to criticism of the changes: "He said something like 'the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.'" Another tipster who has seen the email says Zuckerberg implied that companies were "stupid" for "listening to their customers." The anti-customer diktat has many Facebook employees up in arms, we hear.

When your application becomes an integral part of your customers lives and identities, it is almost expected that they protest any major changes to the user experience. The problem is that you may eventually become jaded about negative feedback because you assume that for the most part the protests are simply people's natural resistance to change.

I tend to agree that disruptive companies don't listen to their customers in the narrow sense of using them as a barometer to decide what products or features to build. Customer feature requests aren't the source of input that would spawn a Netflix in a world that had Blockbuster & Hollywood video. Such disruptive products are spawned from understanding the customers better than they understand themselves. If you had simply "listened" to Blockbuster's customers you'd think the best way to compete with them would be to have cheaper late fees or a bigger selection in your store. Netflix actually went a step further and understood the underlying customer problems (e.g. even going to a video store is a hassle which is why you end up with late fees in the first place) and created a product that was truly disruptive.

Using that model of "disruptive companies" the question then is whether the new Facebook is an example of understanding your customers better than they understand themselves or is truly a mistake? For my take on the answer I'll first point out a comment on Valleywag on the redesign

Here's the problem with the redesign. Twitter is a micro-blog. The 140 character Livejournal.

Facebook is not a blog. In its old form it was a really great PHONEBOOK. A phonebook that not only updated your acquaintance's (most FB friends are not friends) contact info, but also gave you a general summary of their life. It was a big picture kind of thing: Where they are, who they're dating, what school or job they have, and how to contact them. It was never about "sharing" your daily thoughts on how great your panini was or omg gossip girl is back! The livejournal twit-blog crap is messing up the phonebook interface.

This is the crux of the problem with the Facebook redesign. The expectations around how user relationships were created on Twitter are totally different from how they were on Facebook. On Twitter, users explicitly decide as part of following someone that they want all of the person's tweets in their stream. In fact, this is the only feature of the relationship on Twitter. On Facebook, you have relationships with people that attempt to mirror your real life so you have your boss, coworkers, school friends and acquaintances all trying to be part of your social graph because FB is really a kind of "rolodex" in the sky.

The fact that you got a news feed was kind of a side effect of filling out your virtual rolodex but it was cool because you got the highlights of what were going on in the lives of your friends and family. There is a legitimate problem that you weren't getting the full gist of everything your 120 contacts (average number of Facebook friends) were doing online but it would clearly lead to information overload to get up to the minute updates about the breakfast habits of some guy who sat next to you in middle school.

Somewhere along the line, it seems the folks at Facebook didn't internalize this fundamental difference in the social context that differentiates user to user relationships on Twitter versus Facebook. This to me is a big mistake.

Now Playing: Goodie Mob - They Don't Dance No Mo'

I still dream about being back in the Nigerian military school which I attended two decades ago. Wow, two decades.

Wow, even trippier is that the school has a web site.

Now Playing: Supremes - Stop! In The Name Of Love

Our mystery panelist has been unveiled.

Standards for Aggregating Activity Feeds and Social Aggregation Services MIX09-T28F

Thursday March 19 |2:30 PM-3:45 PM | Lando 4201

By: Marc Canter, Monica Keller, Kevin Marks, John McCrea, Dare Obasanjo, Luke Shepard Tags: Services

Come hear a broad panel discussion about aggregating social feeds and services from leading people and companies in this rapidly evolving area including Dare Obasanjo from Microsoft as panel moderator, John McCrea from Plaxo, Kevin Marks from Google, Luke Shepard from Facebook, Marc Canter from Broadband Mechanics, and Monica Keller from MySpace.

You can read my previous post to learn more about what you can expect will be discussed at the panel.

Now Playing: Metallica - ...And Justice For All

Details of my upcoming panel at Microsoft's MIX 09 conference are below.

Standards for Aggregating Activity Feeds and Social Aggregation Services MIX09-T28F

Thursday March 19 |2:30 PM-3:45 PM | Lando 4204 (might be changing to 4201)

By: Marc Canter, Monica Keller, Kevin Marks, John McCrea, Dare Obasanjo Tags: Services

Come hear a broad panel discussion about aggregating social feeds and services from leading people and companies in this rapidly evolving area including Dare Obasanjo from Microsoft as panel moderator, Kevin Marks from Google, Monica Keller from MySpace, Marc Canter from Broadband Mechanics, and John McCrea from Plaxo.

News feeds and activity streams as they pertain to social networks is a pretty hot topic given the rise of services like Twitter and Facebook along with their attendant ecosystems. As more and more services provide activity streams as APIs and we see them showing up across different web sites such as FriendFeed and on the desktop (e.g. Seesmic for Facebook, Tweetdeck's new Facebook integration, etc), it is a great time to talk about whether we need standards in this space and what they should look like.

There is also interesting food for thought as to whether we have reached the state of the art in this space or whether there is still more innovation to be seen and also what form it could potentially take. Most importantly, as social networks start propagating activity across each other (e.g. using Twitter to update Facebook status, sharing Flickr activities with my Windows Live Messenger buddies, etc) is this the beginning of the much heralded dream of social network interoperability or are we still far away from making this a reality?

PS: We might have a surprise fifth panelist. I'm still working on the details and will update this post if the person can make it.

Now Playing: Mystikal - Unpredictable

Yesterday I was part of the Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet panel at the SXSW conference. I've been interested to see what the key take away would be for people that attended the panel and it seems the votes are in. The BBC report on the panel is titled Social networks 'are new e-mail' which is extremely similar to the coverage in the VentureBeat report titled Is the social stream the new email?

Although the "X will kill Y" spin is always good for spicing up a technology story there is an interesting trend that is worth watching. For many people, email serves multiple purposes. It is a way to have conversations and also a way for them to share information. However activity streams such as the Facebook news feed, Twitter and the what's new feed on Windows Live are creating new ways for people to share things about themselves or that they find interesting with others. Joe Kraus of Google described this as the shift from active to passive sharing.

These days I'm more likely to post an interesting link by sharing it on Twitter and have it filter out to my social networks on Facebook and Windows Live than I am to share it via email and risk spamming a bunch of my friends and coworkers. As more people embrace social networking, the trend of using email for certain types of sharing will likely decline. It is already interesting to note that Perez Hilton's #1 Traffic Source Is Facebook and it would be interesting to see if this is a trend that crosses more categories of sites (e.g. I wonder if YouTube gets more traffic from email services or from social networks). 

Where things get interesting is in trying to bridge the gap between active and passive sharing. Sending an email about your latest vacation pics may be too intrusive but you also may not want to just relegate them to being shown in your friends' feeds to be gone from sight if your friends don't log-in in time. David Sacks of Yammer mentions Twitter's @reply feature as one way to bridge this gap. On Twitter, you can push content out into the ether not caring particularly if your friends read it or not but when you do it is just a special character away to send a directed message to them. It will be interesting to see if other services figure out a feature that provides the same functionality as Twitter's @reply and is similarly lightweight.

PS: Food for thought, can you imagine the 25 random things meme on Facebook spreading as effectively if it was an email chain letter?

Now Playing: Disturbing Tha Peace - Growing Pains (Do It Again)

These are my notes from the The Search for a More Social Web talk by Dave Morin.

I had expected this talk to be about lessons learned by Facebook along the way as they've built the site. It actually was more of a product launch keynote and overview of recent launches.

There was a brief preamble about the history of communications from carrier pigeons and the postal service to telegrams and computers. Computers have become increasingly social from when they were first connected into a major computer network as ARPANET, followed by the creation of the World Wide Web, then email [ed note - I think he has his chronology wrong with this one] and chat. However social communications via computers hasn't really come into its own until recently.

Facebook has been working on the social graph for a few years. With Facebook, people for the first time are sharing their real identities and personal content on the Web in a big way. As time has gone by the nature of Facebook's social graph has changed. What was once a graph of relationships between college kids is now a graph that include  coworkers, friends, families and even celebrities.

There are three key pillars in the current Facebook experience

1. The stream (which used to be called the news feed): A chronologically sorted list of what people in your social network are saying, sharing and doing.
2. Social everywhere: With Facebook Connect they have now made it possible to bring social to every site on the Web.
3. The social graph: The graph of connections between users which has been expanded to enable users to connect to everything they care about. The recently announced changes to Facebook Pages now enables brands to participate as nodes in the graph and show up in the stream. Examples of such profiles around celebrities and brands on Facebook include CNN, Barack Obama and U2.

At this point, Dave Morin brought on Gary Vaynerchuck from Wine Library TV to talk about his experiences using the new, improved Facebook Pages to promote his brand and connect with his fans. The first comment Gary made was being glad that he no longer had to put under with the 5000 friend limit if he wanted to be able to participate fully in Facebook. He considers the changes to have turned Facebook into a word-of-mouth marketing machine on steroids. When he posts a video, it shows up in real time in the news feeds of his thousands of fans who can then redistribute it to their social networks if they like or dislike it with the click of a button [ed note – I really love that Facebook explicitly separate the notion of re-share and "like" instead of what FriendFeed does]. With Facebook he has the ability to note only broadcast to his customers but also listen to them by reading the hundreds of comments they leave in response to his videos. He considers this an important paradigm shift in how brands communicate with users and considers Facebook to be the most powerful social media marketing tool around today.

Dave then gave an overview of the four key aspects of the redesigned homepage shown below.

Filters enable you to control what content you see in your stream. The stream is a real-time stream of changes from your social network. The publisher allows you to share your thoughts or interesting content. The highlights section functions like the old news feed by showing you content from people you interact with the most or other notable content from your stream so you don't miss it.

The talk then switched focus to Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect enables all 175 million users of the site to take their Facebook experience to a host of partner sites. There are currently 6000 websites that have implemented Facebook Connect including TechCrunch, Vimeo, Meetup, Geni and Joost. All of these services have mentioned increased engagement from their user base from deploying Facebook Connect. TechCrunch has been getting higher quality comments from people who use the integration since it is attached to their real names. When you combine Joost with Boxee, it is now possible to see social to television by seeing what your friends are watching from your TV. There is also Aardvark social search engine which also will be integrating Facebook Connect [ed note – not clear this last one has actually shipped].

Facebook Connect has not only been used to bring social to the web but also to the desktop as well. Two key examples are Xobni integrating with Facebook Connect to bring social to your desktop email client and Apple iPhoto adding the ability to upload photos directly to Facebook. At this point Dave brought on Loic Le Meur of Seesmic who announced a new desktop client built on Adobe Air for interacting with Facebook now available at http://www.seesmic.com/facebook . You can find out more about this on Loic's blog post about the launch at Seesmic Launches the First Facebook Desktop Client Available Today. Screenshot of the application below. It only does status updates for now but is expected to show richer media types in forthcoming releases.

The question then is what are the next steps for Facebook with regards to their platform. In 2006, they shipped their first set of APIs. In 2007, they shipped the Facebook platform which now has over 50,000 applications. 2008 was the year of Facebook Connect. In 2009, they have done a couple of things thus far. They have opened up APIs to status, notes, links and videos. They are now active in community standards like OpenID and ActivityStreams where they are ably represented by Luke Shepard. They have also contributed to open source projects like memcached.

one more thing…

Dave announced Facebook Connect for the iPhone. He then brought on a number of CEOs of various iPhone application companies to talk about upcoming or just released applications for the iPhone that will integrate with Facebook. The CEO of Playfish which makes three of the top ten games on the Facebook platform and has over 60 million users was the first to speak. They are debuting Who has the biggest brain? for the iPhone. You can challenge your friends on Facebook and see where you rank with them directly from the iPhone. He was followed by the CEO of Social Gaming Network (SGN) which is debuting at least two games with Facebook integration. The first is Agency Wars where users can create a secret agent character then recruit or assassinate their Facebook friends. They are also the makers of iBowl which will be updated with the ability to see when your Facebook friends are online and challenge them to a game of bowling. One of the co-founders of Tapulous was next to talk about their next product Tap Tap Revenge 2 which is shipping with not only 250 new songs but also will use Facebook Connect so that you can challenge your Facebook friends to games in a new split-screen mode. Although they have their own social network it pales in comparison to the highly connected, 175 million user strong social graph on Facebook. Patrick O'Donell from Urbanspoon also spoke about their Facebook integration. Urbanspoon has 1 million restaurant reviews and 4 million iPhone users who have used the "shake" feature of the application over 200 million times. The key integration with Facebook is that restaurant reviews entered via your phone will now show up on your profile in Facebook and in your friends' stream. Joe Greenstein of Flixster was the final iPhone application developer to talk about their Facebook integration. They have 3.4 million users of their application on the iPhone and will now gives those users the ability to integrate their Facebook identity with the application. There are more iPhone applications expected to ship with Facebook integration in the coming weeks including applications from Zynga, Loopt, CitySearch, MTV, Citizen Sports and more.

More details on the Facebook Connect for iPhone announcement can be found on the Facebook official blog post entitled Facebook Connect for iPhone: Friends Now Included.

Now Playing: Dr. Dre - Let Me Ride (remix)

I'll be attending the SXSW interactive conference this weekend and wanted to share my schedule for any of my blog readers who want to meet up and chat after one of the sessions I'll either be attending or participating in.

SATURDAY

10:00 am ·  Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?  (danah boyd on privacy & social networks)

11:30 am ·  The Search for a More Social Web (Dave Morin from Facebook talking about the industry's search to make the Web more social. The kind of talk I'd have expected to be given by Kevin Marks)

2:00 pm ·  Opening Remarks: Tony Hsieh (the founder of Zappos.com talks about their legendary reputation as the kinds of customer service)

3:30 pm ·  Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet (your opportunity to heckle me on a panel – Facebook, FriendFeed, Yammer and Windows Live folks on the future of feeds in social networks)

5:00 pm · <nothing in this time slot interests me>

6:30 pm ·  Salon: Friendship is Dead (I always love discussions on whether social networks have devalued the notion of friends or made some of these ties stronger. wonder if they'll talk about Cameron Marlow's research on Maintained relationships in Facebook)

SUNDAY

10:00 am · <nothing in this time slot is in my areas of interest>

11:30 am ·  OpenID, OAuth, Data Portability and the Enterprise (Joseph Smarr and Kaliya Hamlin are well known for getting identity, authentication and authorization concerns on the Web so it will be interesting to hear their perspectives on what lessons can transfer to the enterprise, if any)

2:00 pm · <I'll spend this time getting my affairs in order since I go straight to the airport after my panel>

3:30 pm ·  Post Standards: Creating Open Source Specs (another opportunity to heckle me on a panel – two people from Microsoft on a panel on "open source" specs !?!)

I'll try to write up the sessions I attend while on the plane and will post them next week if I get around to it.

Now Playing: Geto Boys - My Mind's Playin Tricks On Me

In reading Facebook's recent announcements about upcoming changes to their homepage I've thought it weird that they are being so blatant about their fear of Twitter and altering the dynamic of their site so radically. Like John Battelle said, Facebook Shows "What's On Its Mind" – Twitter.

It seems pundits and social software nerds like myself aren't the only ones that think this. Below are a sampling of comments that confronted me on my Facebook homepage in the user replies to the Facebook post Welcome to your New Home Page.

As I've mentioned before, inline comments in feeds can detract a whole lot more than people think. This is one thing I love about Twitter's model. Just because I follow a popular user on Twitter doesn't mean I have to succumb to the flood of less than stellar replies from the rest of their followers.

Now Playing: DJ Green Lantern - We All Die Someday (Eminem/Lloyd Banks/Obie Trice/50 Cent)

After logging in, be sure to visit all the options under Configuration in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 26 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.

Below is a chart of home prices in my zipcode taken from Zillow 

We bought our house around the peak of that chart. According to Zillow our home seems to have lost about $50,000 in value since we bought it. That seems high on the surface but I know of at least one house in our neighborhood that just sold for $60,000 less than what the owners paid for it around the same time we bought our house.

I don't expect that the recently announced home owner rescue plan by the Obama administration (which is covered in a great Q & A in the New York Times blog) will have any effect on us given that we can afford our house and aren't in dire financial straits. Unless I end up one of the 3,600 waiting for the other shoe to drop and can't find a new job. At least I'm no longer an H-1B so I don't have to worry about needing to leave the country within a week or two if laid off.

I expect house prices to drop even further before we hit the bottom. This is a rational expectation when you look at the following chart

None of this would be a concern if we plan to live here for the next 20 – 30 years. However I have a horrible daily commute and as a new dad I'm not enamored with the schools in the area. 

So I punched some numbers into Pay Or Go: Walk away from your mortgage calculator and the result was a recommendation to walk away if we don't expect the house to appreciate back to the price we paid for it in the next 5 – 7 years. Given the historical chart above, I don't.

Articles like Silicon Valley 'underwater' homeowners: Should I stay or go? point out that the biggest consequence of walking away is having a blemish on your credit score for up to seven years. This implies to me that if moving to a neighborhood whose schools I feel better about is important then it makes sense to take the credit hit now, rent a place and put away the cost savings over the next seven years so we can have a great down payment when we want to move to that house in the great school district when Nathan will be about 7 years old.

On the one hand, I feel like I'm shirking some financial responsibilities even thinking about this but on the other hand I want to do what's best for my family. What do you guys think?

Now Playing: Bob Marley & The Wailers - Redemption Song