Over Christmas 2009, I sat down with my mother to explain to her what Facebook is and how it works. This turned out to be an uphill battle, and it lead to a few important realizations about Facebook and the speed at which social media is evolving.
The first question that everyone new to Facebook or Twitter asks when informed that they can post all their stuff publicly is "Who cares?" It’s a valid question, to be sure. I tried to explain the use of being constantly plugged into your social stream or marketing and self-promotion, as well as the concept that in a world where social media is such an omnipresent thing, quantity has generally replaced quality as the yardstick for your output. This is not to say that a constant stream of inanities will help you out, but nevertheless, the point of 140 character messages and the like is to send many small pieces out into the cloud and hope that the important ones get picked up. Effective use of social media depends on finding the right channels of distribution for your outgoing content and the right filters for your incoming content.
The major thing that I realized while teaching Facebook to a Baby Boomer is that it is a complete mess of design. I didn’t realize this until trying to explain it to a newcomer. This wasn’t always the case; when it was first launched for college students (and I was young enough to be on the ground floor for this), it was a simply a profile page, a wall where people could write things, photos, groups, and events. Minus a couple of odds and ends, the system had a finite number of clearly defined components, and it was easy for us to use. Then, as the system started to expand, so, too, did the applications, functions, and features. Most attempts to revitalize the system to incorporate the exploding mess of content were met with strong pushback from the user community (how many invites to a "We Hate the New Facebook" group did you get back in the day?). Therefore, the model of, say, operating systems (large steps forward with tiny tweaks along the way), which Facebook once kind of followed, has been replaced by an endless stream of updates and tweaks, modifications and minor changes. Each one has been small enough for the acclimated user community to quickly adjust, but for new users, they are now stepping into a complete frankenstein of a system with a pretty hefty learning curve for the uninitiated.
It is this kind of content overload that has made Twitter viable in the first place. Many people, when hearing the concept, say something along the lines of "but that’s just Facebook status". True, to a degree, but think of it this way: When you visit yahoo.com, you are greeted by a messy smattering of groups, email, news, programs, shopping, etc., and, oh yeah, there’s a search bar around there somewhere. When you visit google.com, you are greeted by a bar and a button. It’s the simple functionality that makes it what it is, and this is why Twitter, although lame in many cases, is successful and only growing. Quality and structure has given way to quantity and brevity.
