Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.
But it's not a better and prettier interface. It's just awful. Granted, the only ads that appear on a Timeline page are in a narrow column off to the side (I didn't even know there were any ads until I specifically checked for them after reading this article), so I'm not sure how valid this conspiracy theory is. But it doesn't change the fact that Timeline looks horrible.
I think its interesting how mixed the response is. I'm rather indifferent on timeline, but I've talked to designer/UI/UX people who both love it and hate it, for various reasons. Apparently different people like different things.
It is worth noting that every change Facebook has ever made has been deemed awful by a significant number of people. I'm not certain Facebook, or anyone for that matter, could make an update that satisfies everyone.
It's important to keep in mind the scale of Facebook's user base. At nearly 900,000,000 users upsetting 1% of the users with a change creates 9,000,000 angry people.
Sponsored stories will begin appearing in the Timeline. That was the intent behind removing the straight chronological river (newsfeed), to be able to place ads into your stream in a way that looks more natural.
I think how it looks is subjective. I like the new look of it and how it's easy to see older content where before it was nearly impossible. I also think the idea of having these kind of communication records will be interesting later on when a younger generation can look back on someone's life experiences. Today we have very few of these kinds of records (outside of maybe some photos and letters) unless your family was very diligent about its history.
The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily.
This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'
Perhaps they're running out of ways to innovate and worthwhile things to do? Facebook, in its core is a very simple product. Most of the work I imagine is in making sure the servers don't crash. Sure everyone and their mom uses it, and it sounds sexy to work there, but actual work you do? Doesn't sound that complicated, cutting-edge or innovative. It's not like they're doing genetic engineering, or self driving cars.
As for not going with a straight chronological list, I think that really the idea behind Timeline is to take all the information that was put in Facebook and present it in something that is more akin to digital scrapbooking. They want you to have something more personal and emotional so that you're more attached to it. Their ad about it is clear about that: Facebook should be the place where you keep track of your life and expose it (a certain way) to and share it with your friends.
For that, you want to highlight a specific picture or event, but still have little anecdotes sprinkled here and there. They want you to go through the Timeline like you'd go through a photo album where you'd have a mix of the big events (graduation, marriage, births, etc.) with the little things, so that you can hear "oh, remember that one? When we went to Disneyland and you fell in the pool…", "you were so mad at him that day! Look at what you wrote on your wall…", etc.
Not having just a list makes it a bit more interesting to peruse. It's like going through a shoebox of photos and souvenirs, spread them out and you see some things, not others… I'm not saying they've nailed it, but it's a first version of it and it's an interesting experiment. It's hard to make an interesting photo album by hand, it's even harder to make something semi-automated.
As as side-note: The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
I find that interesting since I personally rarely see people's profiles or timelines.
Making a photo collection look interesting automatically is actually really straightforward. I think anyone who spends serious time attacking this problem will arrive at a solution.
Use the EXIF timestamp of when each photo was taken. Make a web page for each month, and group photos together by day to make it easy to skim through. Limit the number of photos shown on this page for any given day (put the rest on their own page) and you've automatically got variety. With those two simple organizational steps, viewers of the photo collection are set up for success in quickly finding photos that interest them, assuming there are some.
Agreed. I find it visually frustrating to read two columns simultaneously (going back/forth from left/right sides of the timeline). It's so cluttered I don't ever find myself visiting my own profile anymore.
About the only thing I use FB now for is the feed, but then Twitter serves the same function w/ better control over who I want to follow.
I'm pretty sure someone actually just saw Path and thought "that's kind of cool". (And then decided to implement it only on the web and not on the mobile.)
It's hard to say what facebook's intentions here without inside knowledge, but I wouldn't discount it. The founder of modern propaganda and advertising, Edward Bernays, performed many extremely subtle experiments that had dramatic shifts in how Americans behave to this day. (By the way, Bernays coined the phrase 'public relations' to replace 'propaganda' after it had been co-opted by the Nazis).
He got women to smoke by calling them 'freedom torches' and orchestrating high society women to light cigarettes in a demonstration for suffrage.
He facilitated the modern retail industry by shifting American behavior from a 'need-based' consumer to a 'want-based' consumer.
There are billions of dollars being spent to increase the effectiveness of advertising and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the world's biggest advertiser used subtle tactics to achieve this aim.
Google spends dollars to increase the relevance of advertising. Relevance is a means to effectiveness. Some of Google's most effective ads are relevant, text only, in the margins of pages. Propaganda and changing behaviors is a leap away from ad placement and layout online.
Facebook released Timeline so people want to publicize more of their life. More data = more advertising. I think business people use simple equations to justify their decisions.
The Century of The Self, a 4 part documentary by Adam Curtis, covers exactly what you just mentioned. Fascinating stuff, and available in its entirety on youtube.
Surely the entire of facebook constitutes one big "secret psychological advertising conspiracy." That sounds like a perfect description to me, if you discount the alarmist, x-files connotations of "conspiracy."
Neuromarketing is a pretty standard practice now, I don't think any of this is controversial.
I agree. I can't see how anyone would imagine that Facebook aren't working hard at their job, which is, in fact, delivering ads and making people click on them. Or that all that investment is spent paying smart people to have fun and sow the seeds of happiness worldwide, and every once in a while pay a little attention to the business model as an afterthought.
I would really, really appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we ever applied the term "conspiracy theory" to the common-sense assumption that a for-profit company's business decisions are motivated by (gasp, shock) profit.
By making your users your priority you create an environment where they want to be and will continue to use your platform. Putting your users first allows you to continue to profit through means like advertisements. If you put your users second to profits you'll quickly alienate them. I tend to think consumer facing companies like Facebook and Google really do think of their users first, but perhaps I'm just naive.
I think you're contradicting yourself by saying their concern for users derives from profit and then saying they put their users "first." If acquiring and keeping users is a means to an end, namely advertising revenue, then users are secondary to advertising revenue. Is there some other dynamic in the corporation (other than profit) that drives Facebook and Google to value users? If the answer is human good will, then I can believe it has some influence in some cases, but not that it ever overrides profit. Good will can be influential where there is a sincere belief that it is the best guide to long-term profit, and I think Google's founders were fairly successful in instilling that belief in their corporate culture, but in a mass consumer business that belief will be worn down through the process of making many small decisions where the two priorities conflict.
I think these companies view the users as the purpose and the advertising as the means - not the other way around. Both Google and Facebook were born out of an interest to improve the world and solve a problem. This idealism along with thinking long term about the product is what puts users first. I think the conflicts always tend to resolve on the side of benefiting users (ads that are relevant to a user's interest, or sponsored search results that are likely what the user is looking for anyway). The goal is to make a profit in a way that also adds utility to the user and doesn't distract from the main 'mission' of the company whatever that may be - and I don't think it is to make money.
Companies that become entirely about perpetuating their own existence, where the means of profiting becomes their purpose, seem to use nasty business practices and power to ruin competition rather than compete on product quality. They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice. I don't think this method is a good long term solution and from my perspective I don't think Facebook or Google are acting in this way (at least for now).
I think the conflicts always tend to resolve on the side of benefiting users (ads that are relevant to a user's interest, or sponsored search results that are likely what the user is looking for anyway)
We justify advertising because so many of the products and companies we love are built on it, plain and simple. Advertising is "good" in the same sense that pollution is good: in a world without it, much of what we love wouldn't exist. The assumption that Google or Facebook ad revenue reflects value delivered to their users is extremely, extremely dubious, and I don't even see a prima facie case for it. When a rational actor spends money, that's good evidence that it is receiving value, but nobody would model a Facebook user making purchases as a rational actor. If they did, the ads would look rather different. So what basis do we have for saying that effective ads benefit users, except as a way of funding the service by extracting payment from users' attention budgets instead of from their bank accounts?
At one time, people loved seeing smokestacks belching smoke because that meant prosperity, jobs, and abundance. On HN, I think we feel the same way about ads. More effective ads on the web means more prosperity, more employment, and more products for us to enjoy.
Both Google and Facebook were born out of an interest to improve the world and solve a problem
I give credit to Google for having a corporate culture that reflects its founders, but in the long run, survival and profit are more fundamental in a corporation's hierarchy of needs. With Google we probably won't know exactly when it becomes just like AT&T or GM or any other large corporation; we'll recognize it sometime after the fact. Even in their current state, they're still a business with accountants, investors, and quarterly statements. The people who work there are ambitious and want to buy nice stuff; they get goals and reviews and promotions. All the elements that cause corporations to operate at a much lower moral level than the people they're made of are present. The corporate culture can only hold those forces back for so long.
As for Facebook, when did people start regarding them as a benevolent, well-intentioned company (distinct from their great product which really does improve the world?) I knew they were out to change the world and shape the future, but it seemed like improving the world happened as a side effect.
They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice.
First, you're describing the corporations that emerged victorious from previous great changes; don't underestimate how dominant that behavior can be. Someday, long after Google's "not evil" ethic is no longer an asset they have to lose, standard corporate tactics will be the best way for them to deliver shareholder value. And the shareholders will get their value. Second, it sounds like you're describing Facebook right now. I have Diaspora and Google+ accounts, but of course Facebook is the one I check all the time. Facebook can do almost anything to me and not lose me as a customer, for the simple reason that current social networks don't interoperate and therefore social networking accounts aren't portable from one provider to another in any meaningful way.
EDIT (abusing the edit function to reply): I agree with you that calling Facebook or any other company "malevolent" is incorrect. I think it's better to say that sometimes a company's interests are aligned with the interests of their users, and sometimes they aren't. I also agree that it looks like Google's and even Facebook's interests are aligned with their users' interests in many ways. However, that will change someday, and the very smart guys at Google and Facebook will start acting on that change of interest before we even recognize it.
Also, I really don't see it as them "tricking" us. They aren't doing anything deceitful or morally wrong. They're just doing their job, which is to...
Facebook often advertises products related to user information (merchandise from a movie for example). If it's something the user may be interested in buying they hadn't thought about but noticed from that ad, I see that as a benefit of targeted advertising. I'm not sure I understand your point about this.
As far as Google and Facebook I think they recognize that they're better off taking care of their users for long term success. I suppose you could argue this is only a temporary stance based on company culture, but I don't know if I'd agree with it.
Facebook takes a lot of heat and is often talked about on HN as this malevolent advertising company (privacy be damned), but to me this criticism always seemed overblown. I've always personally viewed them as actually trying to do what they say they're trying to accomplish. As far as the last point about Facebook being dominant, just because a company is dominant doesn't mean they're entirely about perpetuating their own existence. Facebook still rapidly makes changes and improves their platform, they also didn't do anything anti-competitive to try and destroy Google+ or Diaspora (I think Mark even donated to Diaspora).
This is all background to why I think the OP's article is unlikely. I think these companies build new features to keep their users happy and using their site, not design new features with the main purpose of secretly tricking them into more advertising. It isn't all about profit.
We need to ask a simple question - what are the metrics that Facebook seek to optimise?
I can't imagine a universe in which they aren't placing at least some weight on the standard suite of "engagement" metrics. If that is the case, then they're seeking to increase the amount of time you spend on the site, the number of pages you view, the number of ads you see (and click), the frequency with which you scroll below the cut and so on.
Creating an interface that provides fast, easy access to the most relevant information means that most of your core metrics get worse. Facebook would have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally far-sighted for their interface to do anything but get worse. They would need a corporate culture that is either centralised and vision-led, or utterly indifferent to short-term measures of engagement and profitability. Zuckerberg is a smart man, but he's not a Steve Jobs or a Larry Page.
This reminds of a story mentioned in Steven Levy's "In The Plex". Larry and Sergey are showing off their page rank algorithm to a search engine company early on showing how much better and faster it is. The person they're showing it to is upset at how fast it is saying, "it's too good". He wanted the search to be slow so that users would be stuck on the search engine page longer and view more ads. Larry and Sergey left thinking the guy was an idiot.
I don't think it takes that much intuition to realize that treating your users well and building something for them will be better in the long run.
big companies are good at executing established business models, and bad at discovering new ones. small companies, the opposite. it could never be any other way.
I don't about the conspiracy behind timeline , but timeline just made it difficult for em to read through my posts , some stay on left some on left.
It would be good , if they keep whole month's content on 1side and next on other . It helps me viewing .
But its not better and its not prettier, its a mess and one I generally completely avoid. I used to occasionally click on peoples profiles especially if I was considering connecting, now its such an assault on the senses I don't bother. My FB useage as a result is probably declining...
Or the Facebook Timeline is their New Coke--they can roll it out, then in a few months roll back to something similar, but not exactly the same as, the old layout.
If it is their New Coke, then what you mean is they can roll it back to something exactly the same, and then have conspiracy nuts repeat nonsense claims that it is different now. New Coke was not a way to distract people while they changed the recipe of classic, classic didn't change.
Well, according to Snopes this is a myth; bottlers had been allowed to use HFCS in original Coke prior to the introduction of New Coke. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
The new product continued to be sold and retained the name Coca-Cola (until 1992, when it was officially renamed Coca-Cola II), so the old product was named Coca-Cola Classic, also called Coke Classic, later just Coke and for a short period of time it was referred to by the public as Old Coke. Many who tasted the reintroduced formula were not convinced that the first batches really were the same formula that had supposedly been retired that spring. This is partially true because Coca-Cola Classic differed from the original formula, as all bottlers who hadn't already done so were using high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar to sweeten the drink
What Coca Cola actually ships from Atlanta is the syrup, unsweetened. The bottlers add water and sugar to this, and AFAIK [1], it is up to their discretion what type of sugar to use.
This is one of the reasons that Coke tastes different in different places - a can of Coke in Montreal is very different from one in Toronto.
I'd have fact-checked this, but for some reason, Wikipedia is down... :)
[1] Perhaps this is no longer the case, but it certainly was in 1989, when I "interned" at a Coke bottling facility in Harare, Zimbabwe for a week
I was just talking to a friend about timeline and how hard it is to navigate. I can't even go on friends pages that use it - it's just too hard to get used to, especially when almost everyone else uses the regular interface.
Can't be certain, but I know that from a subjective perspective my brain feels the same way browsing timeline as it does when I'm doing math or reasoning intently. The experience of cognitive strain is present in both cases.
One example in the book is that even hard to read fonts can cause cognitive strain and make you judge the content of the text differently. I see that as being largely analogous.
From my reading of the book (and the exerpt you have mentioned here), I'd agree that System 2 is in play when looking at the Timeline; it does create some cognitive load.
However, I can't remember anything backing your assertion that System 2 is more susceptible to advertising. In fact, my reading is the opposite: System 1 cannot help but read words or look at images, and it is easily swayed by various advertising techniques. It would be System 2 that processes what's happening, realizes you are trying to be sold something that you probably don't want/need, then rejects it. Isn't it a lack of engagement of System 2 that leads people to instinctively click ads or follow spam links?
Having followed the changes in their platform for years that doesn't seem to be the case. It s probably somebody new wanting to try some new idea. Zynga does have an optimization engine in place, Facebook does trial and error too much: profile boxes, tabs, no boxes, top stories etc, it's just pointless variations of a newsfeed.
I like the new Timeline feature but the inability for me to switch to some sort of "old" view when I just want to see a perfect list of updates without any fancy grouping an annoyance. For casual use the Timeline is good but it leaves a lot to be desired when I want to see everything.
Joking. But the Timeline view in the iOS app places all items in a single column.
That said, Facebook has basically become a place where I sync my tweets and other services like Instagram so that people that I know who don't use Twitter yet can see them.
I love the timeline layout.. id rather scroll easily through stuff from a couple of years ago and get a good overview of what I was doing than go through photo galleries I have on my PC with no context or further information.
It has its rough edges, but I have to say that scrolling down the Timeline is a more personal and emotional experience than can be found anywhere else.
Your argument doesn't compute. You're comparing content (photo gallery) with a design structure. The "two column" grid includes photos, locations, new friends, comments, etc.
Perhaps I should've been more specific. His argument was that scrolling down timeline is one of the most emotional experiences.
Scrolling through a haphazard column system of photos of mishmash isn't that emotional to me. Going one by one through a persons Facebook album is more emotional to me because of the focus (one photo) and organization (I know which album I picked).
Photos are a pretty emotional experience, true. However I think there's a major difference. Typically photos on my facebook represent moments, short memories in time... mostly happy.
Looking at a photo makes me remember the context of the photo. However a status update is different. They're more frequent, they're less significant. They give context around the less important things.
For example, I remember the first time I looked at my timeline there was a status update that said something along the lines of "Oh man new doughnut at the Dunkin!" I wrote it a few years ago, and it was Completely pointless, and meaningless.. but then I remembered it, because later that day my mom was hit by a car. The entire events of that day flashed in my mind. Frankly that was pretty emotional for me.
I think the formulation that "the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads" is awfully reductive. Reading Steven Levy's In the Plex really gave me a sense of what the people at Google are actually about, and it's not just making money. There's a somewhat naive idealism at work that you can judge however you want, but you should acknowledge its existence.
While I tend to give the people at Facebook less credit, I do think there's a similar idealism at the core of the project. But I think they're fundamentally undermining human connection in many subtle ways that I've written about on my blog. Specifically, and more to the point, I think Timeline undermines the human intimacy of private sharing for the benefit of public performance.
Isn't this the basis of "disruption"? Change the format and you cause people to look more closely at something. Users will get used to timeline and they'll have to change again. Also I'm skeptical of the statement "facebook will be changing the way our brains process advertising".
The problem I have with Timeline is the awful way that it organizes posts. The two column format is awkward and it makes it hard to search or even casually read posts as you scroll down, because your eyes are darting between the two columns rather than one. The grouping is pretty crap, too.
As much as I want to like it, I don't even try to read people's profiles anymore.
If Facebook wanted me to pay 100% attention to the Status feed, they've succeeded. And by Status feed, I don't mean whatever that thing on the right frame is. Who reads that anyway?
I agree, they've pretty much broken every single UI convention by having information chronologically separated in between columns. As a society, we're used to following down a column because of the breaks, like a newspaper. For some stupid reason, Facebook has broken this convention and made posts go back and forth between the column break which is idiotic.
What I despise is the lack of privacy, because if I tag a photo with a friend's name, all their friends can see it, regardless of my privacy settings which forces me to no longer tag my friends.
I basically have stopped using Facebook except for reading up on the newsfeed.
Very interesting. I know what I'll be doing with my afternoon.
I lacked this language, but yes I think that's a fair reading of my position.
There's a broader argument that facebook really is providing a valuable service to us by making us aware of products and services that really will make our lives better. I'm unmoved by that claim, as I suspect most of us are.
>"the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.”
I always chuckle at thoughts like this. If we want to rank on a scale of intellect it isn't clear that simply being a Google/Facebook/<insert tech company here> employee puts you in the 'smartest in the world' bucket.
There are PLENTY of people that aren't software engineers that are likely much smarter than anyone at any of these companies, unless we are to say that you can't be smart unless you are a software engineer, which seems silly.
It is in the same bucket with the clearly false 'we only hire the smartest people in the world' meme, also trumpeted by a lot of tech companies.
But "s/world/high tech/g" (and maybe "s/smartest/some of the smartest/g") and the broader point still stands, even without the hyperbole: lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Not maybe, definitely. Unless you are trying to make the claim that the set of the smartest people in tech is a proper subset of the employees of Google (or Google employees unioned with Facebook employees). I think lots and lots of very smart people that don't work for Google or Facebook would strongly disagree, and evidence is on their side.
>lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Yes, but lots and lots of very smart people are also doing <insert other kind of tech venture here>. The statement seems to pre-suppose that there is no or little value in the work they do and they should be working on more 'valuable' problems.
I personally hate advertising, but I don't look down on people that work at Google or Facebook if their job involves increasing click-through rates, nor do I believe having smart people focused on these kind of tasks is 'holding us back' in any meaningful way. To believe so implies that 'smart people' can excel/advance the state of the art for anything they work on, and thus they should focus on more 'important' things. If these smart people were attracted to doing these more important things that may be true, but then they would probably be doing them already. If they are attracted to what they are doing then they should continue, and do it as best they can. Further it ignores the idea that there are side-effects of their work that could be more valuable to the world as a whole (like new discoveries in machine learning, or algorithms, or even human psychology).
The fundamental currency that buys advancement is intelligence, creativity and passion for what you are doing. If you have 2 out of 3 you are unlikely to contribute meaningfully, and simply reassigning everyone at Google to work on say self-driving cars is unlikely to yield reliable, self-driving cars any faster, in fact it would likely cripple the effort.
You are not the target audience. Yes, if you're reading this, you are not the audience that Facebook is building for. The Timeline is there after being extensively tested and stays there are long as the results (Facebook definition) are better than the alternative.
In case you missed it, to be clear - you are not the target audience.
The problem with timeline, for me, is lack of context. Scroll back to the beginning of my life on facebook and you see exchanges between me and my then girlfriend.
Scrolling through 5 years worth of status updates gave you context for this (sortof), it was psychologically "far" away.
Being able to just click "2006", and easily see that stuff is creepy.
This is why I can't stand this timeline nonsense.
So...do I delete all of this stuff? I don't have a problem with these things being a part of my history, I just don't like them being presented in such a readily-available way...
I have similar feelings about this. I'm deleting everything that isn't part of my current life, and I've all but stopped posting. It's a shame, really.
This is also my main problem with it. The idea is nice to have some sort of diary where you log important events in your life so that you can scroll back in someone's history and see when important things happened.
But sometime before Timeline, Facebook made a change so that each post has an individual visibility to give users more control or whatever, and when I switched over to Timeline, all my old posts that weren't private automatically appeared on my timeline, and I can't easily change the visibility of all those old posts, that are now much more easily accessible.
I want the newer posts on my Timeline to be visible, so others can see the latest crap I shared with my friends, but I want the older posts to fade into obscurity, unless I actively bring them back again.
Thanks, but you can only set past post visbility to "Friends", not "Private", and I don't see any definition of how old a post has to be to be considered a "past post".
I, unlike others, love Timeline, but I think the product cast too wide a net. Do I want to go back and revisit posts I made in 2006? I sure do, and love to be able to do that easily.
Do I want others to do that? Well, not so much. Timeline would have been a perfect product in my view if it only applied to your own profile.
I can't be the only person who has never used timelines?
I assumed other people used facebook like me: To read what friends had posted, maybe occasionally post myself and respond to messages/events, nothing more.
The only timeline I have seen was one in which my friend put a picture of baby Jesus as his birth picture...
Along these same lines, one could say that Timeline's addition of the personalized banner image with the user's name across it makes users look more like brands, possibly in an attempt to desensitize Facebook users to the difference between brands and actual people.
If anyone else had trouble reading the site because of font rendering in Firefox (what is up with those r's, D's and S's!?), I found readability made it digestible.
The biggest benefits of timeline are (1) making it easier to see stuff in the past and (2) calling out the most memorable important events/content while hiding less important stuff. They could have done this in a list format, but using the Timeline makes it much more clear that important things are being called out while some other things are being left hidden.
It's a powerful solution to the problem of browsing all of a user's content over time, which was very difficult in the old profile. And it's a perfectly good reason for Facebook to try Timeline without ascribing ulterior motives.
I'd never heard of System1/2 before, but it makes a lot of sense. Sites that are similar to the FB timeline, like Pinterest (which I recently signed up on to try it out), also give me that same sense of having to 'pay attention' more. It becomes more of a novelty instead of something that I'd want to use all the time. I think that is part of the popularity of sites like Craigslist and Hackernews, which present the information in an easily scanned format. They both fall into System 1. I think that as I do UX design for my site, I'll keep this in mind.
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It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily.
This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'
For that, you want to highlight a specific picture or event, but still have little anecdotes sprinkled here and there. They want you to go through the Timeline like you'd go through a photo album where you'd have a mix of the big events (graduation, marriage, births, etc.) with the little things, so that you can hear "oh, remember that one? When we went to Disneyland and you fell in the pool…", "you were so mad at him that day! Look at what you wrote on your wall…", etc.
Not having just a list makes it a bit more interesting to peruse. It's like going through a shoebox of photos and souvenirs, spread them out and you see some things, not others… I'm not saying they've nailed it, but it's a first version of it and it's an interesting experiment. It's hard to make an interesting photo album by hand, it's even harder to make something semi-automated.
As as side-note: The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
I find that interesting since I personally rarely see people's profiles or timelines.
Use the EXIF timestamp of when each photo was taken. Make a web page for each month, and group photos together by day to make it easy to skim through. Limit the number of photos shown on this page for any given day (put the rest on their own page) and you've automatically got variety. With those two simple organizational steps, viewers of the photo collection are set up for success in quickly finding photos that interest them, assuming there are some.
That's what your feed (i.e. the "main" page) is for, right?
The timeline is for when you want to look at just one person's activity... it's basically "WHERE user = 'xyz' ORDER BY entry_date DESC".
About the only thing I use FB now for is the feed, but then Twitter serves the same function w/ better control over who I want to follow.
He got women to smoke by calling them 'freedom torches' and orchestrating high society women to light cigarettes in a demonstration for suffrage.
He facilitated the modern retail industry by shifting American behavior from a 'need-based' consumer to a 'want-based' consumer.
There are billions of dollars being spent to increase the effectiveness of advertising and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the world's biggest advertiser used subtle tactics to achieve this aim.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM
Neuromarketing is a pretty standard practice now, I don't think any of this is controversial.
I would really, really appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we ever applied the term "conspiracy theory" to the common-sense assumption that a for-profit company's business decisions are motivated by (gasp, shock) profit.
Companies that become entirely about perpetuating their own existence, where the means of profiting becomes their purpose, seem to use nasty business practices and power to ruin competition rather than compete on product quality. They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice. I don't think this method is a good long term solution and from my perspective I don't think Facebook or Google are acting in this way (at least for now).
We justify advertising because so many of the products and companies we love are built on it, plain and simple. Advertising is "good" in the same sense that pollution is good: in a world without it, much of what we love wouldn't exist. The assumption that Google or Facebook ad revenue reflects value delivered to their users is extremely, extremely dubious, and I don't even see a prima facie case for it. When a rational actor spends money, that's good evidence that it is receiving value, but nobody would model a Facebook user making purchases as a rational actor. If they did, the ads would look rather different. So what basis do we have for saying that effective ads benefit users, except as a way of funding the service by extracting payment from users' attention budgets instead of from their bank accounts?
At one time, people loved seeing smokestacks belching smoke because that meant prosperity, jobs, and abundance. On HN, I think we feel the same way about ads. More effective ads on the web means more prosperity, more employment, and more products for us to enjoy.
Both Google and Facebook were born out of an interest to improve the world and solve a problem
I give credit to Google for having a corporate culture that reflects its founders, but in the long run, survival and profit are more fundamental in a corporation's hierarchy of needs. With Google we probably won't know exactly when it becomes just like AT&T or GM or any other large corporation; we'll recognize it sometime after the fact. Even in their current state, they're still a business with accountants, investors, and quarterly statements. The people who work there are ambitious and want to buy nice stuff; they get goals and reviews and promotions. All the elements that cause corporations to operate at a much lower moral level than the people they're made of are present. The corporate culture can only hold those forces back for so long.
As for Facebook, when did people start regarding them as a benevolent, well-intentioned company (distinct from their great product which really does improve the world?) I knew they were out to change the world and shape the future, but it seemed like improving the world happened as a side effect.
They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice.
First, you're describing the corporations that emerged victorious from previous great changes; don't underestimate how dominant that behavior can be. Someday, long after Google's "not evil" ethic is no longer an asset they have to lose, standard corporate tactics will be the best way for them to deliver shareholder value. And the shareholders will get their value. Second, it sounds like you're describing Facebook right now. I have Diaspora and Google+ accounts, but of course Facebook is the one I check all the time. Facebook can do almost anything to me and not lose me as a customer, for the simple reason that current social networks don't interoperate and therefore social networking accounts aren't portable from one provider to another in any meaningful way.
EDIT (abusing the edit function to reply): I agree with you that calling Facebook or any other company "malevolent" is incorrect. I think it's better to say that sometimes a company's interests are aligned with the interests of their users, and sometimes they aren't. I also agree that it looks like Google's and even Facebook's interests are aligned with their users' interests in many ways. However, that will change someday, and the very smart guys at Google and Facebook will start acting on that change of interest before we even recognize it.
Also, I really don't see it as them "tricking" us. They aren't doing anything deceitful or morally wrong. They're just doing their job, which is to...
As far as Google and Facebook I think they recognize that they're better off taking care of their users for long term success. I suppose you could argue this is only a temporary stance based on company culture, but I don't know if I'd agree with it.
Facebook takes a lot of heat and is often talked about on HN as this malevolent advertising company (privacy be damned), but to me this criticism always seemed overblown. I've always personally viewed them as actually trying to do what they say they're trying to accomplish. As far as the last point about Facebook being dominant, just because a company is dominant doesn't mean they're entirely about perpetuating their own existence. Facebook still rapidly makes changes and improves their platform, they also didn't do anything anti-competitive to try and destroy Google+ or Diaspora (I think Mark even donated to Diaspora).
This is all background to why I think the OP's article is unlikely. I think these companies build new features to keep their users happy and using their site, not design new features with the main purpose of secretly tricking them into more advertising. It isn't all about profit.
I can't imagine a universe in which they aren't placing at least some weight on the standard suite of "engagement" metrics. If that is the case, then they're seeking to increase the amount of time you spend on the site, the number of pages you view, the number of ads you see (and click), the frequency with which you scroll below the cut and so on.
Creating an interface that provides fast, easy access to the most relevant information means that most of your core metrics get worse. Facebook would have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally far-sighted for their interface to do anything but get worse. They would need a corporate culture that is either centralised and vision-led, or utterly indifferent to short-term measures of engagement and profitability. Zuckerberg is a smart man, but he's not a Steve Jobs or a Larry Page.
I don't think it takes that much intuition to realize that treating your users well and building something for them will be better in the long run.
The new product continued to be sold and retained the name Coca-Cola (until 1992, when it was officially renamed Coca-Cola II), so the old product was named Coca-Cola Classic, also called Coke Classic, later just Coke and for a short period of time it was referred to by the public as Old Coke. Many who tasted the reintroduced formula were not convinced that the first batches really were the same formula that had supposedly been retired that spring. This is partially true because Coca-Cola Classic differed from the original formula, as all bottlers who hadn't already done so were using high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar to sweeten the drink
What Coca Cola actually ships from Atlanta is the syrup, unsweetened. The bottlers add water and sugar to this, and AFAIK [1], it is up to their discretion what type of sugar to use.
This is one of the reasons that Coke tastes different in different places - a can of Coke in Montreal is very different from one in Toronto.
I'd have fact-checked this, but for some reason, Wikipedia is down... :)
[1] Perhaps this is no longer the case, but it certainly was in 1989, when I "interned" at a Coke bottling facility in Harare, Zimbabwe for a week
One example in the book is that even hard to read fonts can cause cognitive strain and make you judge the content of the text differently. I see that as being largely analogous.
However, I can't remember anything backing your assertion that System 2 is more susceptible to advertising. In fact, my reading is the opposite: System 1 cannot help but read words or look at images, and it is easily swayed by various advertising techniques. It would be System 2 that processes what's happening, realizes you are trying to be sold something that you probably don't want/need, then rejects it. Isn't it a lack of engagement of System 2 that leads people to instinctively click ads or follow spam links?
Joking. But the Timeline view in the iOS app places all items in a single column.
That said, Facebook has basically become a place where I sync my tweets and other services like Instagram so that people that I know who don't use Twitter yet can see them.
Scrolling through a haphazard column system of photos of mishmash isn't that emotional to me. Going one by one through a persons Facebook album is more emotional to me because of the focus (one photo) and organization (I know which album I picked).
Looking at a photo makes me remember the context of the photo. However a status update is different. They're more frequent, they're less significant. They give context around the less important things.
For example, I remember the first time I looked at my timeline there was a status update that said something along the lines of "Oh man new doughnut at the Dunkin!" I wrote it a few years ago, and it was Completely pointless, and meaningless.. but then I remembered it, because later that day my mom was hit by a car. The entire events of that day flashed in my mind. Frankly that was pretty emotional for me.
While I tend to give the people at Facebook less credit, I do think there's a similar idealism at the core of the project. But I think they're fundamentally undermining human connection in many subtle ways that I've written about on my blog. Specifically, and more to the point, I think Timeline undermines the human intimacy of private sharing for the benefit of public performance.
http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and-perf...
If Facebook wanted me to pay 100% attention to the Status feed, they've succeeded. And by Status feed, I don't mean whatever that thing on the right frame is. Who reads that anyway?
What I despise is the lack of privacy, because if I tag a photo with a friend's name, all their friends can see it, regardless of my privacy settings which forces me to no longer tag my friends.
I basically have stopped using Facebook except for reading up on the newsfeed.
[1] http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Home
I lacked this language, but yes I think that's a fair reading of my position.
There's a broader argument that facebook really is providing a valuable service to us by making us aware of products and services that really will make our lives better. I'm unmoved by that claim, as I suspect most of us are.
Does anyone know what quote he's alluding to here? I recall skimming an article on it some time ago, but I can't actually find the original.
I've been thinking about this trend - and, quite frankly, being depressed by it - a lot recently.
And yeah, it is depressing. And I spend my time thinking about what they're doing... not sure if that is better or worse.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
I always chuckle at thoughts like this. If we want to rank on a scale of intellect it isn't clear that simply being a Google/Facebook/<insert tech company here> employee puts you in the 'smartest in the world' bucket.
There are PLENTY of people that aren't software engineers that are likely much smarter than anyone at any of these companies, unless we are to say that you can't be smart unless you are a software engineer, which seems silly.
It is in the same bucket with the clearly false 'we only hire the smartest people in the world' meme, also trumpeted by a lot of tech companies.
But "s/world/high tech/g" (and maybe "s/smartest/some of the smartest/g") and the broader point still stands, even without the hyperbole: lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Not maybe, definitely. Unless you are trying to make the claim that the set of the smartest people in tech is a proper subset of the employees of Google (or Google employees unioned with Facebook employees). I think lots and lots of very smart people that don't work for Google or Facebook would strongly disagree, and evidence is on their side.
>lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Yes, but lots and lots of very smart people are also doing <insert other kind of tech venture here>. The statement seems to pre-suppose that there is no or little value in the work they do and they should be working on more 'valuable' problems.
I personally hate advertising, but I don't look down on people that work at Google or Facebook if their job involves increasing click-through rates, nor do I believe having smart people focused on these kind of tasks is 'holding us back' in any meaningful way. To believe so implies that 'smart people' can excel/advance the state of the art for anything they work on, and thus they should focus on more 'important' things. If these smart people were attracted to doing these more important things that may be true, but then they would probably be doing them already. If they are attracted to what they are doing then they should continue, and do it as best they can. Further it ignores the idea that there are side-effects of their work that could be more valuable to the world as a whole (like new discoveries in machine learning, or algorithms, or even human psychology).
The fundamental currency that buys advancement is intelligence, creativity and passion for what you are doing. If you have 2 out of 3 you are unlikely to contribute meaningfully, and simply reassigning everyone at Google to work on say self-driving cars is unlikely to yield reliable, self-driving cars any faster, in fact it would likely cripple the effort.
In case you missed it, to be clear - you are not the target audience.
Scrolling through 5 years worth of status updates gave you context for this (sortof), it was psychologically "far" away.
Being able to just click "2006", and easily see that stuff is creepy.
This is why I can't stand this timeline nonsense.
So...do I delete all of this stuff? I don't have a problem with these things being a part of my history, I just don't like them being presented in such a readily-available way...
But sometime before Timeline, Facebook made a change so that each post has an individual visibility to give users more control or whatever, and when I switched over to Timeline, all my old posts that weren't private automatically appeared on my timeline, and I can't easily change the visibility of all those old posts, that are now much more easily accessible.
I want the newer posts on my Timeline to be visible, so others can see the latest crap I shared with my friends, but I want the older posts to fade into obscurity, unless I actively bring them back again.
Do I want others to do that? Well, not so much. Timeline would have been a perfect product in my view if it only applied to your own profile.
I assumed other people used facebook like me: To read what friends had posted, maybe occasionally post myself and respond to messages/events, nothing more.
The only timeline I have seen was one in which my friend put a picture of baby Jesus as his birth picture...
http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets
I click on Google ads at least a couple times a month, because they tend to be relevant to what I'm looking for at the moment.
It's a powerful solution to the problem of browsing all of a user's content over time, which was very difficult in the old profile. And it's a perfectly good reason for Facebook to try Timeline without ascribing ulterior motives.