dsp· by gregor hochmuth

Facebook: Designed for Audience? Not so much.

In Audiences on 10 August 2008 with 3 comments

Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”

Facebook is designed for person-to-person and group communication. But is it designed for Audience?

Profile Pages, Audiences and the News Feed

Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.

Sharing with the News Feed: Did it ever reach my friends?

Facebook was the first major social network to introduce the News Feed concept, which has since become a standard sauce for stickiness in many places (not StudiVZ surprisingly).

But Facebook’s implementation of the News Feed doesn’t capture the full power of designing for Audience: While Twitter distributes every message consistently, Facebook decides algorithmically which update is shown to whom in the News Feed. Algorithmic filtering is nice in theory, but such black-box behavior is simply unpredictable for the user.

• “When I post new things, will my friends actually see them?”, one might wonder.
• And conversely:
  “Have my friends posted something that I’m not seeing? The news feed is cluttered right now with people I don’t care about.”

Anything that’s unpredictable produces a feeling of uncertainty — and that’s never a comfortable feeling. Even with Facebook’s recent attempts to introduce smarter filters, users only have relative means to customize their feed (more of this, less of that).

Fewer Feedback mechanisms

Facebook mainly offers only one kind of feedback in the News Feed: commenting. Imagine a concert, in which you could only leave written notes as you left — no clapping, no booing.

For the person who shared something, there is no insight about the other activity that takes place around it: who and how many viewed my photos? who re-shared my link? who also become a fan of X? or joined my group Y? Facebook answers none of those rewarding questions.

Users could be posting & sharing more, but …

Because users don’t get a good sense of who’s listening and who isn’t, Facebook hasn’t been embraced as a place to publish pro-actively. Sending inbox messages, events or photos is mostly push-driven (and generates an email — “you are invited to an event” or “tagged in a photo”). But for everything else you share on your profile (links, status updates, joining a group, etc), do you know if it ever reached your friends?

Who capitalized on this gap? FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is the same setup as Twitter, but with more content: You know who’s listening and you choose the people you listen to. A useful premise but it also has a catch: the word “more”. Too much content, too many people — which is exactly the problem that Facebook is trying to address with its algorithmic feed. But what’s a solution then? It’s not the “middle ground” and it has nothing to do with smarter filters.

The answer is feedback loops, which is a perfect segue into the next post:
The 3 Loops of Designing for Audience.