Unlike millions of people who went out to see Social Network the movie last weekend, I stayed home happily with my iPad Twitter app and catching up on Google Alerts on 'social network'. Granted that I may be missing out on popular culture, but I didn't feel that I was left out since this morning, thanks to Facebook's surprise re-launch of Group. I've watched the live announcement via livestream on TechCrunch, and I must admit that I played Mark Zuckerberg (CEO) and Chris Cox's (VP of Product) statements many times afterward. Perhaps that was my way of getting vindicated from missing the opening weekend of Social Network...
For those of you expert Facebook users who have created Groups (Old Group), today's Group (New Group) announcement could have sounded as repackaging the existing functionality with simpler UX with few more features, such as group chat, wiki-like document sharing and email integration. Well, essentially it is. Old Group can be created with members that you invite and Old Group can be used to represent context or place. But what's interesting was the narrative that Mark and Chris presented around their approach to solving context problem.
Problem
Problem that Facebook is trying to solve is representing social context and groups that exist in real life. For example, conversation that people have in a bar with bunch of friends is different from dinner table conversation. They not only differ by topic and type of vocabularies used, but also by relationships to each other members, social norm, and expected level of privacy. In addition to all these contextual attributes, or because of them, people often put on different persona and act slightly differently in each context.
If you look at Facebook today, each message exchanged in these contexts and social norms are all mixed together, packaged as home page news feed, and served as aggregated news stream to each user. It's great in seeing what's going on overall, but it's losing lot of information, namely context. Users are less likely to participate in sharing because they are not sure whether they should act like they are on dinner table with family or on a bar stool hanging out with slightly inebriated friends. Not knowing where status update will end up, users tend to share less.
Facebook's in the business of making people share more with each other. Hence, this is a big problem for them.
Solution Idea: Crowdsourcing + Seamless User Experience Design
What gets interesting is how Facebook is approaching this problem. It's clear that they want to create context-specific small groups, and provide easy way to interact within the group. But how would Facebook get there?
Facebook is not a fledgling startup anymore, and they know that they have limited options. A swift unilateral system-wide change can backfire -- they've seen Google Buzz failure -- and anything that can be interpreted as erosion of privacy will attract public scrutiny. They also know that solving this problem with complex algorithm will not only take long time but will run the risk of expensive false positive cases. Just imagine reading about Harry Reid (D-NV) getting incorrectly grouped together with Joe Wilson (R-SC) because they both got friends at AT&T -- not totally unlikely scenario as both received contribution from AT&T according to OpenSecrets.org. Or even worse, Facebook correctly grouping you, your significant other and your ex-lover(s) would be enough cause mass exodus from Facebook due to in-your-face privacy violation.
Instead Facebook is thinking 'social' as solution. Web 2.0 is really about people acting as both consumers as well as producers of information. Social network is just a platform where these interactions can be facilitated. Without user traffic and user sharing information social network will cease to exist. I could almost hear that Mark and Chris just coming short of admitting that they cannot solve this problem on their own during their remarks.
But what's brilliant about today's announcement is the focus on user experience design. After acknowledging this is a problem that users must solve on their own, Facebook is focusing on creating seamless user experience so that anyone can create groups and start using them. They are betting on that New Group will be so easy that anyone who can send group email can create a group with similar effort, and start using it again and again to exchange ideas with the same audience. Users will get context and history of all interactions along with group chat and basic document sharing, and Facebook will get to identify small groups that you interact with.
This 'social' solution hinges on getting user experience right. Facebook has to win over users with its ease of use, and such a seamless UX that process is almost invisible to the user. If users see easy experience and clear benefits of using groups, users will solve this problem for Facebook.
If users don't find the experience to be seamless? Well then there are plenty of other challengers to help us. Diaspora, any one?
For those of you expert Facebook users who have created Groups (Old Group), today's Group (New Group) announcement could have sounded as repackaging the existing functionality with simpler UX with few more features, such as group chat, wiki-like document sharing and email integration. Well, essentially it is. Old Group can be created with members that you invite and Old Group can be used to represent context or place. But what's interesting was the narrative that Mark and Chris presented around their approach to solving context problem.
Problem that Facebook is trying to solve is representing social context and groups that exist in real life. For example, conversation that people have in a bar with bunch of friends is different from dinner table conversation. They not only differ by topic and type of vocabularies used, but also by relationships to each other members, social norm, and expected level of privacy. In addition to all these contextual attributes, or because of them, people often put on different persona and act slightly differently in each context.
If you look at Facebook today, each message exchanged in these contexts and social norms are all mixed together, packaged as home page news feed, and served as aggregated news stream to each user. It's great in seeing what's going on overall, but it's losing lot of information, namely context. Users are less likely to participate in sharing because they are not sure whether they should act like they are on dinner table with family or on a bar stool hanging out with slightly inebriated friends. Not knowing where status update will end up, users tend to share less.
Facebook's in the business of making people share more with each other. Hence, this is a big problem for them.
Solution Idea: Crowdsourcing + Seamless User Experience Design
Facebook is not a fledgling startup anymore, and they know that they have limited options. A swift unilateral system-wide change can backfire -- they've seen Google Buzz failure -- and anything that can be interpreted as erosion of privacy will attract public scrutiny. They also know that solving this problem with complex algorithm will not only take long time but will run the risk of expensive false positive cases. Just imagine reading about Harry Reid (D-NV) getting incorrectly grouped together with Joe Wilson (R-SC) because they both got friends at AT&T -- not totally unlikely scenario as both received contribution from AT&T according to OpenSecrets.org. Or even worse, Facebook correctly grouping you, your significant other and your ex-lover(s) would be enough cause mass exodus from Facebook due to in-your-face privacy violation.
Instead Facebook is thinking 'social' as solution. Web 2.0 is really about people acting as both consumers as well as producers of information. Social network is just a platform where these interactions can be facilitated. Without user traffic and user sharing information social network will cease to exist. I could almost hear that Mark and Chris just coming short of admitting that they cannot solve this problem on their own during their remarks.
But what's brilliant about today's announcement is the focus on user experience design. After acknowledging this is a problem that users must solve on their own, Facebook is focusing on creating seamless user experience so that anyone can create groups and start using them. They are betting on that New Group will be so easy that anyone who can send group email can create a group with similar effort, and start using it again and again to exchange ideas with the same audience. Users will get context and history of all interactions along with group chat and basic document sharing, and Facebook will get to identify small groups that you interact with.
This 'social' solution hinges on getting user experience right. Facebook has to win over users with its ease of use, and such a seamless UX that process is almost invisible to the user. If users see easy experience and clear benefits of using groups, users will solve this problem for Facebook.
If users don't find the experience to be seamless? Well then there are plenty of other challengers to help us. Diaspora, any one?
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