[Wsuug] Users? What do they know?

[Kelley Walker]

I thought this article was interesting. It's about social
media platforms like facebook, linkedin, etc. and why they
took off -- from a decidedly sociological perspective. For
user experience issues, though, it was interesting because,
with Facebook feeds, the feature was implemented *in spite
of* users' complaints. It's an issue in user experience
design: balancing between user demands/requests/suggestions
and, basically, ignoring them (a la the advice of entities
like 37 signals).




http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.htm
l
September 7, 2008

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that
Facebook  
worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.

Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook
in his  
dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly
amassed  
nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of
personal  
details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their
favorite  
TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music
they had in  
rotation and the various ad hoc "groups" they had joined
(like "Sex  
and the City" Lovers). All day long, they'd post "status"
notes  
explaining their moods - "hating Monday," "skipping class
b/c i'm  
hung over." After each party, they'd stagger home to the
dorm and  
upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning
after  
commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became
the de  
facto public commons - the way students found out what
everyone  
around them was like and what he or she was doing.

But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It
required a lot  
of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day
your  
Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new
tidbits;  
it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing
their  
relationship status to "single" when they got dumped. But
unless you  
visited each friend's page every day, it might be days or
weeks  
before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely.
Browsing  
Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone's
room to  
see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a
sense, this  
gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply
because  
if you had 200 friends on the site - a fairly typical number
- there  
weren't enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend
all the  
time.

"It was very primitive," Zuckerberg told me when I asked him
about it  
last month. And so he decided to modernize. He developed
something he  
called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively
broadcast  
changes in a user's page to every one of his or her friends.
Students  
would no longer need to spend their time zipping around to
examine  
each friend's page, checking to see if there was any new
information.  
Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed
would  
appear: a single page that - like a social gazette from the
18th  
century - delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip
about  
their friends, around the clock, all in one place. "A stream
of  
everything that's going on in their lives," as Zuckerberg
put it.

When students woke up that September morning and saw News
Feed, the  
first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about
every little  
thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out
to  
hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits
of news -  
Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with
Matthew -  
and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged
with  
names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For
students,  
it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with
everyone you  
know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying,
all the time.

"Everyone was freaking out," Ben Parr, then a junior at
Northwestern  
University, told me recently. What particularly enraged Parr
was that  
there wasn't any way to opt out of News Feed, to "go
private" and  
have all your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook
group  
demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide
privacy  
options. "Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming
the Big  
Brother of the Internet, recording every single move," a
California  
student told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Another chimed in,
"Frankly,  
I don't need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally,
and Ted  
has become friends with Steve." By lunchtime of the first
day, 10,000  
people had joined Parr's group, and by the next day it had
284,000.

Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two
decisions. The  
first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting
users decide  
what kind of information went out. But the second decision
was to  
leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once
people tried  
it and got over their shock, they'd like it.

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