We all know Google’s mantra of “Don’t be evil”. It was a direct statement against all things Microsoft (referred to as the Evil Empire by many a pundit), and for the first few years of Google’s life, they pretty much followed it. But when it came time to get into the Chinese market, many saw Google’s cooperation with the totalitarian, human rights-violating Chinese government as going directly against the mantra. And so it goes. A mantra that had helped shine a light on the company as the underdog fighting against injustice has now covered that company in a blanket of hypocrisy.
Facebook is the undisputed market leader in the Social Graph. They may have less users and less traffic than MySpace, but they hold the mindshare of the industry and garner far more media attention. They’ve also shown an amazing propensity to fail spectacularly, many times over. And that’s a Good Thing. While they certainly don’t intend to fail, when they do, it acts as a teaching moment to their vast user base and developers looking to continue to build on the Graph. Two new mantras can inform the direction of where we’re headed:
Don’t Be Creepy
Large social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, will always have creepy users on them. That condition is just as unavoidable as the creeps residing on the Internet as a whole. But Don’t Be Creepy isn’t about the users. It’s about implementing the right features that maximize the display of useful information but don’t creep out.
Facebook started out as decidedly un-creepy, because each network was limited to a single college or university. It was exclusive, and it was the anti-thesis of MySpace, where those people who didn’t go to college hung out. It was friendly, warm, and inviting. Much like those first few weeks of freshman year.
When Facebook launched its News Feed, a complete backlash ensued. Everyone could see what everyone else was doing! Well, everyone could already see what everyone else was doing, but it wasn’t as easy as seeing a feed on one’s home page. Groups were formed with the title “Facebook has gotten creepy!” and hundreds of thousands of users joined them. Days later, Facebook scaled back the information being presented, and allowed users more fine-grained control of what about them was displayed, a system still being tweaked to this day.
Facebook flubbed even more with the Beacon program, a way that advertisers could track users’ spending habits online, and report purchases back to Facebook to be displayed in the News Feed, with the online shopper never informed of what exactly was happening. I find it hard to believe that Facebook didn’t realize that this would cause a backlash (and it did, spearheaded by advocacy groups like MoveOn.org). It seems to me that Facebook was willing to pay the cost of grief in order to move its user base (and thus the industry as a whole) to begin to accept such advertising tactics. But it was still creepy, and all it’s creepiness was promptly axed, allowing users to completely opt out of the system.
Don’t Be Annoying
This mantra addresses the problems of information overload and the cost of creating a new account and profile at every new social service. No one wants to be bombarded with notification emails. Some people get completely enraged when they get an automated email that they didn’t want (I’ve been on the other end of the line). Annoyance leads to a distrust of the offending system, and that’s not good for anyone. Setting notification preferences needs to be one of the first things a person does on a new social network. And it needs to be more than a binary, yes or no, option. Instead of a new email arriving with each new friend request, why isn’t a daily digest available of all notications?
Which bring us to the problem of there being so many new social networks. The cost of joining a social network is twenty minutes of time and effort spent setting things up. “But I already did this!” the user thinks, which is completely correct. This particular annoyance is already being addressed by the data portability movement, and establishing those standards is an essential piece of a truly functional Graph.
Conclusion
Don’t be creepy.
Don’t be annoying.
Two simple rules to live by, and we have Facebook to thank for demonstrating to the world how important those rules really are.
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