Some users no, but others are. Haven’t you heard of Facebook Credits?
Again, Facebook makes a non-trivial amount of money from users by selling Facebook Credits directly to them. So yes, many users do give Facebook money.
Second, if you’ve ever looked at any of Facebook’s advertising minisite, you would see that the company lists the users as an asset that they use to sell advertisers on the wonders of Facebook.
It’s not quite that bad (yet), but this is part of the reason. It’s ugly and unintuitive (at least to me.) I left MySpace for Facebook early on because using MySpace felt like a return to mid-90s web “design.” Ugly, cluttered, too personalized. Yuck. Facebook offered me a clean, neat interface that, at least at the time, seemed pretty easy to navigate and intuit. I didn’t have to dig too far to find out the info I needed.
Since the four years that I made that switch, Facebook has continually screwed with the interface and pretty much everything that I liked about it. I cannot think of a single change they’ve made to improve the interface I had when I originally joined it.
Timeline is a huge eyesore for me. The two column format drives me batty. I hate having to follow that center line to find the arrows (or watch where the boxes end) to figure out whether the stuff on the left or right is the next in chronological order. I’m still not quite sure what items get displayed in the non-Timeline box that appears on the timeline itself. (Items like Friends, Likes, Recent Posts By Others.) One person’s page has one set of items there. Another person’s page has another set of items. And all the graphics that clutter up the page. Ugh! It’s just visual and informational cacophony.
I sometimes wonder if it’s just a generational thing. I’m not exactly that old (36), but I have noticed that the generation younger than me seems to be able to deal with and even want just more stuff crammed into their visual space. Like video games that have way too much freaking information on the state of everything in the game and your player on your screen at one time. I just want the game, my score, and how many lives I have god dammit! (Yeah, I know, the last two are not necessarily relavent concepts in most video games anymore.)
And I understand that, but so far they’ve been correct in their estimates of how far they can push us. Everyone who posts “Timeline sucks! That’s it, no more Facebook for me!” on their Facebook just makes me facepalm. Not a single one of my complaining Friends has actually left. They keep posting. Many of them keep posting to complain about Timeline. And as long as they’re there, Facebook wins, because they’re looking at ads while they post how much they hate Facebook.
It’s exactly like the farmer who has to judge how late he can keep his crop in the field without risking losing it to frost. If he judges wrong and pushes too far, then he’s hosed. But if he can push it and push it just a little further, the crop yield maximizes and he can sell more at market.
Just don’t kid yourself that you’re Facebook’s market. You’re the produce. You’re the, in Facebook’s own term, “asset.” Facebook couldn’t care less if you hate Timeline with the fire of 100 suns, as long as you are still using it.
When they eventually judge wrongly and piss people off enough that they actually leave in droves, then yes, they’ve screwed the pooch. Then they’ll start losing their actual customers, the advertisers.
Really, I think we’re only arguing semantics. We agree Facebook can’t go too far and cause users to leave or they’ll lose advertising dollars. My only quibble is that many users call themselves Facebook customers, and I don’t agree with that use of the term.
On Preview: Oh, hai, Lamia! And, no, I’ve never heard of Facebook Credits. What does one do with them?
No, I haven’t, or I’ve forgotten about it if I have – and I’ve been using Facebook for about seven years. What percentage of their income is from sales of Facebook credits?
I can tell from context that you feel this contradicts WhyNot’s point, but it looks like you are saying exactly the same thing she did – Facebook makes money by selling access to their users to advertisers.
You’re not paying for this board either, do you feel that the board considers you a product?
I know I feel like a cheap whore. But then, unlike the unwashed masses, I’m a sponsored member. So I’ve got a different pimp.
What do you mean by “the board”? While I don’t think the average SDMB user or Mod/Admin feels that way, I’m sure the people who run Creative Loafing Media do. They don’t allow me to post here for free just to be nice.
We won’t know until the go public later this year.
But that doesn’t make the users the “product.” That line of thinking is just freshman year philosophy that’s just one step above using the word “sheeple” in all seriousness.
Okay, so you actually agree with WhyNot’s point, you just don’t like the way she worded it. Glad I could clear that up for everyone.
Social fixer only fixes so much. It doesn’t take away Timeline, it just reorganizes it. Plus at least on my computers it drags too much. And the one thing I thought I’d like is faulty. The notification when someone “unfriends” you. It works sometimes, but it’s more annoying than useful when the friends you lost over a month ago randomly pop up on the list. It’s almost always just people deactivating their account anyway.
And yes that big hideous photo banner reminds me of Myspace. I have noticed too that most of the people I know personally enough to discuss such things who do like the timeline are generally much younger, like my daughter’s age (22).
I think it’s the filtering and the complexity with all the boxes everywhere. I think people just want newest at the top, older posts pushed down. Nothing ignored unless specifically requested.
Woo yeah! You really know how to stick it to The Man!
My only complaint with the timeline layout is that I made up a nice combo cover & profile pic, and last week the layout changed slightly, so they don’t match up anymore. What the…?
Apart from that, I like the timeline much better than the old layout. A huge improvement.
Of course it is true. If we were Facebook’s customers we would be paying them money for the use of their service. We do not. Instead, advertisers pay Facebook to put adsin front of us. Facebook’s users are the product being sold to their advertisers.
Google Plus was launched less than a year ago and has already had a major interface overhaul.
I know only two people who freaked, and both because “old” things they thought were gone showed up again, and were on the page for days before they realized it. Old comments and photos, that sort of thing.
For me, I’m just sick of the changes, period. I understand that Facbook gets boatloads of free publicity every time they make a change, but it’s annoying as heck.
I rarely encounter the Timeline because, as others have said, I’m generally just reading my News Feed. What I don’t understand, though, is what advantage Facebook gains by not allowing me to have the “Sort by Most Recent” option on the News Feed be the default. Why does Facebook want to force me to see things in some random-ass order?
It’s not as random-ass as it may seem. They design it so that information will come to your attention in a way that will draw you in to being a more active user. Everything Facebook does is socially engineered to get you to log in and use Facebook more.