Facebook Feature Fatigue

What did you join Facebook for? To find and reconnect with old buddies, keep in touch with friends and family, and of course enjoy a stream of updates, the like and dislikes, photos, events, groups from everyone we care for.

With recent changes and new features added, all is not well with Facebook. Users are just not liking it but infact hating what comes with it. Change is part of the process which is fine if its for good. The two basic underlying rules for any social networking service to make users be happy about using it:

• Simple Interface – Remember old Facebook days? The interface was good for eyes to look and for mind to use. The more is not good, though there is technological advancement and increase in competition. Look at Google! Type in Google.com in your address bar and the page that opens is still as simple as it was and as it is required. Not that Google hasn’t changed since its launched. Its getting bigger and bigger.
• Communications (Comments / Messages / Chats) Structured Linear one after another with latest on top. Facebook has messed up this basic feature. You have to put some mental effort after logging in, before you understand what is going on… whether the News Feeds are putting all the Top Stories on top with some users having all items in reverse-chronological order and for some reverse-chronological below.

Awkwardly, with new features on Facebook is violating the basics. The new features are confusing users with the information overload. Users surely want to get updated about each other but guess with new features its going a bit off-limits. Facebook’s new look the “ticker” app updates send real time feed on the right hand side of the page.

Average user on Facebook has 150-250 friends and the EdgeRank algorithm of Facebook has been deciding what is good and important for users – censoring the News Feed based on an invisible score, gained on affinity, weight and time of every post.

• Affinity – Measuring how important is the Relationship
• Weight – Quality of Content, a text post or an image, Liked or commented by number of other users.
• Time – Scores decreases over time.

Here is an example in the image below, where we don’t want a software to decide what we want to see.

Only Facebook is measuring relationships. Google sorts results but not filters them and Twitter just gives you everything your connection posts. With friend lists getting bigger, is Facebook finding it difficult to manage the interface for users? Twitter and Google are smiling at users’ Facebook feature fatigue.