Facebook Mini-Review
September 7, 2006 | Business & Commerce | People & Society | Products & Opportunites | Software
Well, I had a demo of Facebook, and it's a very nice web application. [Previously: Attention Metastream. Today: Fred Wilson on the changes (good comments thread).]
(I have removed names from this screenshot.)
It's hard to get a sense of it from the picture, but I can tell that if I were a college student it would be easy to live here and check in frequently and see what my friends are up to and post about my life. There are nine million Facebook users, so they're doing something right.
I also note there is zero "flashy design" on this site. Note the one-color plus black palette, the simple obvious layout, the single ad in the left column, the simple unobtrusive logo in the upper left. It's a beautiful minimalist approach. This has the beneficial side-effect of lowering the server load and bandwidth costs for high-traffic sites.
It seems like the most popular websites either have bad design, or minimal design. You might want to think about that the next time you spend two hours getting the rounded corners just so in your incremental design update. Better to hire a good writer, or to think about your use-cases and user-centric design. As always, design has to support the message and function, not overtake the purpose of the effort. Facebook is a good example of What People Want.
Comments
Facebook is considered cleaner and more usable than MySpace, so you have some support on that score.
Over on the Interaction Designers (IxDA) listserv there's discussion right now about Facebook's recently released "News Feed" feature that shows aggregated content updates from your friends on your home page. It seems like an obviously good interaction design invention until you start thinking about the implications. Evidently it's quite stalker-friendly, which is creeping people out. But one poster to IxDA rightly notes that this info is all open and available already -- it's just that the feed feature concentrates it and makes it easier to access.
Posted by: Meg at September 7, 2006 04:58 PM
There's a possibility that the "stalker-friendly" meme is mis-placed. It follows your privacy settings already in place, so yes it aggregates and makes it easier to "find" but it doesn't change what you can do about it.
It seems like the big rift is that "friends" are a currency, and it doesn't stand for anything more than "accquaintence" -- I think they need some tags or categories for a more granular friendship-scale.
Posted by: Michael J. at September 7, 2006 08:05 PM
Dave Winer has a good post about this today:
http://www.scripting.com/2006/09/08.html#facebook123
Posted by: Michael J. at September 8, 2006 07:26 AM
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