“The new Facebook is here. Try it now.” With those words, Facebook opened up its new redesign. The initial reactions were mixed at best. Application developers were frustrated with the changes. Users were also confused – where did the apps go? The new look for Facebook is a brilliant idea, extracting the value of the News Feed (originally a development that was met with skepticism) and taking it to the next level. This change is both subtle and blatant but will have a drastic effect on the direction of the Facebook ecosystem. A number of studies have analyzed the importance of simple incentives in causing drastic shifts in behavior and its clear that the leadership at Facebook is well aware of them.
The first part of the new picture is the user. After setting up all of my friends on Friendster, Orkut and Myspace the same question always came up. Now what? Sure, I could go look at my friends’ profiles for occasional changes or send them messages – but the first was often hard to find out about and the second I could do much easier with email. Having the Facebook News Feed gave me a reason to come back. Now that I had a friend network I could extract value from it. I could see what my friends were doing. Initially only basic Facebook related tasks showed up but with status messages and other data the same bit of the human psyche that’s made twitter a success. There was suddenly a reason to come back to Facebook on a near daily basis. To a site that’s monetized by advertising views, recurring visitors are a gold mine. The marginal cost to serve each one is tiny and the ad revenue more than sufficient to cover it. Even with all of its resources, however, Facebook’s ability to create functionality that would draw the user back to the site was insufficient. An ecosystem of developers working on Facebook’s platform could create orders of magnitude more content and that’s what the platform was meant to be.
The applications that integrated with the old Facebook would appear on the profile page so naturally, they had content that would add to a user’s profile: their favorite songs, the places they had traveled and their favorite quotes. Some apps did more: complementing the wall, adding features that changed over time (such as plants) or allowed users to play games with each other but the majority simply added static content to the profiles. They filled the need of users to express themselves but once that was done, well, now what? Facebook realized that the apps that were truly valuable to them were the ones that encouraged users to interact and come back to them. Ones that displayed content relevant to each user and ones that created interactions others would know about. Ones that did things that could go into the news feed. With that realization the New Facebook suddenly makes a tremendous amount of sense.
The applications that are static are now relegated to the Boxes tab where no one will see them. They extend a user’s profile but Facebook has never really cared about that. Facebook has realized that any piece of content, no matter how intrinsically exciting, gets old and tired. The only way to keep the site useful and the users coming back is to constantly provide new bits of content which is exactly what the New Facebook incentivizes developers to do.The applications that are now front and center are ones that the user can do something with on a recurring basis and even more importantly the user’s friends can do something with on a recurring basis. Applications that used to have their own versions of this (ie. Super Wall) and fractured a viewer’s update attention to multiple spots in the profile now get forced to use the main feed for their updates or get ignored. If you have an application that doesn’t allow users to come back to it and make changes then it will never be seen again.
For you, the user, this is actually a blessing in disguise. Yes, its hard to give up the current Facebook page with all of the cool doodads that your friends or that cute girl in your class have added to their profile but do you ever look at those doodads more than once? The new Facebook redesign gives you a way to see what online activities your friends have been up to in one centralized place. It’s the same need that Twitter, FriendFeed and many others are trying to fulfill as well.
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