Facebook’s Vision
Facebook’s vision is both more complex and more ambitious,
since Zuck aims to build something that didn’t exist in the real
world before.
Facebook intends to improve the flow and quality of
information between people, to actually improve
communication and relationships. Facebook wants to broadly
improve such a fundamental human activity. And why not?
They’ve succeeded in doing that for the broad swath of collegegoing
Americans.
On one hand, improving communication isn’t an unprecedented
aim. The telephone replaced the telegraph; IM and VOIP are
replacing mail/email and telephone; FedEx replaced the Pony
Express. Communication methods are always improving,
becoming faster, more reliable, and more expressive (able to
contain more information).
But these improvements were all mostly about quantity based
improvements, such as delivery speed, reliability/security, price,
and content throughput. VOIP, pretty much for free, can send
billions of bytes/second of information across the US, while the
horses could probably carry a pack of letters over a month, and
back then people wouldn’t know if the letters even got to where
they were going. But based on my personal sample of
94 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
conversations, the quality of the communication probably hasn’t
improved!
I suggested to Zuck that people65 would want different profiles to
show different sets of friends, or at least to different circles, such
as say their college buddies vs. their professional network. I got
the idea that Zuck hopes that the facebook will make such
confused personal identities a thing of the past. After all, a
majority of facebook college alums continue to use facebook
every day, as they did before graduating, so perhaps they can
persist with a single coherent personal identify for years. Perhaps
their old friends can keep them honest and true to their college
selves, to their young dreams, and their new friends will be
integrated into their existing groups. And perhaps they will find
new friends who are more consistent with their college
personality, instead of being remolded into a new circle of work
friends, whose character is very different than what they were in
college.
Zuck and Dustin and most Facebook engineers have succeeded at
this. They’ve kept their college network and their college
personality into their initial professional career. And I’m sure this
would be everyone’s ideal situation! College was a lot of fun and
Karel Baloun 95
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
65 especially older, more complex, more confused, people. i wouldn’t want an exwife
(if i had one), my kids, and my current professional friends seeing the same
profile. As Facebook opens to “work networks” and open-to-anyone geography
networks, the tension between current and former coworkers emerges, distinct
from students-alumni, since alumni are mostly all happy and colleges don’t have
“company secrets”.
was very effective - I bet we all feel like we learned so much and
grew so much personally in those few years. Work life doesn’t
always feel like that, especially as a new cog in a larger
corporation. We can go for a year or more where we don’t grow
much personally, and can come to measure our success by our
bank account balance or how much stuff we have. Facebook
doesn’t have a MyStuff section, even though having one would be
an excellent business move. They may have it later, because the
stuff we have does communicate information about us, but
college students are not as much into stuff as older working folks,
for whom stuff soothes.
When do Internet users change, or when should companies adapt?
So I told Zuck that older people have different personas to show
different groups of friends. And while he didn’t tell me that was
fake, not genuine or otherwise uncool, he said that might not
have happened to me if I had had Facebook. I could’ve stayed
genuine to myself, and communicated that coherently to all of my
friends.
Instead of just losing touch with them. Yes, unlike the Facebook
generation, I’m having a heck of a time tracking down my
important college friends. My Japan trip was partly about that,
since most of the old contact information I had was destroyed in a
house fire 3 years ago. How quaint ‘eh? Yes, I wrote it on paper,
with a pen. Fortunately, the Facebook is backed up against the
loss of your little book of contact information to fire. Or of your
cell phone to theft. Or of your laptop’s hard drive to failure. You
96 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
don’t have to worry about these, as long as your important friends
continue to value the network.
So Zuck seems to have solved the problem of immediately losing
touch with your school mates, by effectively enabling people to
stay in loose touch over remote distances. So when he sees some
additional communication problem, it would seem natural to him
that the Facebook can and will solve it. The solution is to build
Facebook in a way that avoids the problem, and then the problem
will no longer exist once everyone uses the Facebook. Completely
reasonable, right?
To look at the limits of how much people will adapt to use a
product, contrasted against how much a product should evolve to
serve its people, let’s revisit the “a person has multiple personas
or profiles to show different people” issue. If real communication
means that a person is genuine and real to everyone looking at
his profile, then it means that he should have one single,
consistent profile. Otherwise he is either lying or at least not
revealing the full truth about himself to someone, which is
imperfect communication. So if Facebook doesn’t allow that,
people will remain consistent to all of their online connections.
Major social communication problem solved, and thank you again
Facebook.
Maybe. Will people naturally change their social behavior, in line
with new tools? Sometimes yes, as now I and most technophiles
loathe waiting days for a snail mail response, and have fully
replaced personal letters with email, and may even be going
Karel Baloun 97
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
digital with Holiday and Event cards, which would radically change
their content.
Only if the social function is deemed better, will it be adopted. IM
seems preferable to email, on the same criteria of speed and
availability. However it has partially crashed on the rocks of
making users too available, and now some IM clients allow users
to show a different status message to customizable groups of
users, and some IM users have resorted to always leaving their
status as “busy” or “offline”, contacting others only by initiating
the message. While talking a voice phone call is much faster than
typing, IM leaves a searchable conversation record, and lets me
talk to more than one person about different things at the same
time.
So is a single “persona” better communication?
Well, it is certainly more simple. Some would say that means it is
better, and invoke principles like Occam’s Razor. But what if
communication is naturally, properly, better when it is complex?
Maybe. Maybe relationships will continue to be more complex
than any tool created to manage them. But I’m just a guy, so I
never understand human relationships anyway.
Zuck, I'm told, has no material clutter in his life, and sleeps on a
mattress. He certainly has no clutter in the office. There is his
small white ibook (like Aaron) and not much else. Aaron
decorates his ibook with stickers, but Zuck’s is plain white, like
his “interrogation room” named closed office.
98 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
I speculate that Zuck has no need (at this time) for material stuff,
because his life is full, with Facebook. He is satisfied. Also, for
busy executives it is beyond obvious that whatever is stacked
somewhere will never be used, but that’s actually true for
everyone. Engineers didn’t used to be like that. I remember when
you weren’t an engineer without a shelf full of O’Reilly books,
which you’ve read and refer to regularly, and piles of hardware
(which you built into robots and stuff in your spare time) and
technical magazines and software which show that you are in the
information flow. Now real engineers seem to have nothing on
their desks, and I too am slowly abandoning paper. What
happened?
Finally smart people have reached and come66 to terms with
information overload, and O’Reilly is turning to Safari virtual
bookshelf, and a PDF distribution channel. At facebook, most
engineers have empty desks, or just a few notes which get
naturally thrown away. I wonder if they’ve really simplified, or has
the clutter just moved online, onto virtual desktops covered with
icons, and onto thousands of backend servers.
Clutter is bad, whether it is on a desk, on your laptop’s desktop,
or spread for you throughout the internet. 500 friends is clutter.
Karel Baloun 99
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
66 I’m coming! Wait up! If I can do it, anyone can. When I was a high
school debater, we had to cart around our 10 boxes of paper evidence. Even after
a house fire taught me that “stuff doesn’t really matter”, I’m re-reading How to
Simplify your Life (a Great book) and Again clearing off my desk.
Having overlapping unconnected friends on 5 social networks is
clutter. But good, rich complexity isn’t always clutter.
It’s okay to have your photos on Flickr and your videos on
Youtube and your personal information on your own Yahoo
hosted website, because each one is better and cheaper at its core
service. It’s okay to go to several search engines when looking for
something, because they really are different, and diversity is
good. A google-only world would really suck, as an M$FT world
came really close to sucking. And as social networks move into
more vertical niches, with specialized tools and features for each
one, you may find your internet social life is complex. But having
the same information in 5 social networks is clutter, so I predict
successful social networks will collaborate.
How do we deal with the reality of Friend clutter? In the real
world, we do it by ignoring people. I resolved my college friend
clutter by losing touch with everyone from college. That’s sad.
But I get by. Will I do that again with my current circle of friends
that happens to be centered around my kids’ school? Do I do that
every time I change jobs? Or with my church community every
time I leave? Is this why Americans have so few real, deep,
lifelong friends? Is it just Americans or Homo Modernus? In Japan
also, as people lose their rural connection to place, and their life
long employment system connection to company, the lifelong
friendships everyone had and had taken for granted are
weakening.
100 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
Facebook ensures (as long as people use it) that we’ll never lose
touch with our old friends. They’ll just stay at the bottom of my
500 person deep friends list, and Facebook with fancy algorithms
will figure out what information I care about within that huge
mash of activity among my 500 friends.
However, having a pile of 500 anything is clutter. On google I
have a pile of billions of items, but I never get to see it, since
google shows me only a beautifully simple single box that will
fulfill all my wishes. Google with gmail is trying to do that for me
with my email, where the “archive” button means “don’t worry
son, just let go”. Today on Facebook, I can’t archive my friends,
and it would be rude, sad and maybe wasteful to delete them,
so... even if it is someone I don’t care about anymore, if they
update their profile every day, they are at the top of “MyFriends”.
On LinkedIn I have 270 connections, all of people i really know,
and on facebook I have almost 100, and I have at least 100-200
friends and acquaintances who aren’t on any social network yet,
so I need help organizing this clutter. Among people I know, the
main online strategies I see are “respond when contacted” and
“contact when you need something” and “find interesting person
to chat with when bored” and (years ago) “bond with my target hot
chick and all friends of this hot chick”. These strategies don’t
scale, are not especially nice, and probably wouldn’t really get me
what I most want in life. If I used Facebook heavily, I’d lose touch
with people who are not on the system, even if they are more
Karel Baloun 101
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
interesting or important, just like I have a hard time staying in
touch with friends who don’t use email.
Currently, social networks have really been successful in niche
social segments, with Myspace comprised of overlap from the
music/entertainment, young, and sex-driven segments67.
Myspace is an open network, where any member can see and
friend any other member, which allows for this overlap to exist,
where members from different segments presumably successfully
ignore each other. Closed networks like Facebook serve their
target segments well, and need to figure out the cross network
overlap, both on their own site and across the internet.
Facebook’s vision is both more complex and more ambitious,
since Zuck aims to build something that didn’t exist in the real
world before.
Facebook intends to improve the flow and quality of
information between people, to actually improve
communication and relationships. Facebook wants to broadly
improve such a fundamental human activity. And why not?
They’ve succeeded in doing that for the broad swath of collegegoing
Americans.
On one hand, improving communication isn’t an unprecedented
aim. The telephone replaced the telegraph; IM and VOIP are
replacing mail/email and telephone; FedEx replaced the Pony
Express. Communication methods are always improving,
becoming faster, more reliable, and more expressive (able to
contain more information).
But these improvements were all mostly about quantity based
improvements, such as delivery speed, reliability/security, price,
and content throughput. VOIP, pretty much for free, can send
billions of bytes/second of information across the US, while the
horses could probably carry a pack of letters over a month, and
back then people wouldn’t know if the letters even got to where
they were going. But based on my personal sample of
94 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
conversations, the quality of the communication probably hasn’t
improved!
I suggested to Zuck that people65 would want different profiles to
show different sets of friends, or at least to different circles, such
as say their college buddies vs. their professional network. I got
the idea that Zuck hopes that the facebook will make such
confused personal identities a thing of the past. After all, a
majority of facebook college alums continue to use facebook
every day, as they did before graduating, so perhaps they can
persist with a single coherent personal identify for years. Perhaps
their old friends can keep them honest and true to their college
selves, to their young dreams, and their new friends will be
integrated into their existing groups. And perhaps they will find
new friends who are more consistent with their college
personality, instead of being remolded into a new circle of work
friends, whose character is very different than what they were in
college.
Zuck and Dustin and most Facebook engineers have succeeded at
this. They’ve kept their college network and their college
personality into their initial professional career. And I’m sure this
would be everyone’s ideal situation! College was a lot of fun and
Karel Baloun 95
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
65 especially older, more complex, more confused, people. i wouldn’t want an exwife
(if i had one), my kids, and my current professional friends seeing the same
profile. As Facebook opens to “work networks” and open-to-anyone geography
networks, the tension between current and former coworkers emerges, distinct
from students-alumni, since alumni are mostly all happy and colleges don’t have
“company secrets”.
was very effective - I bet we all feel like we learned so much and
grew so much personally in those few years. Work life doesn’t
always feel like that, especially as a new cog in a larger
corporation. We can go for a year or more where we don’t grow
much personally, and can come to measure our success by our
bank account balance or how much stuff we have. Facebook
doesn’t have a MyStuff section, even though having one would be
an excellent business move. They may have it later, because the
stuff we have does communicate information about us, but
college students are not as much into stuff as older working folks,
for whom stuff soothes.
When do Internet users change, or when should companies adapt?
So I told Zuck that older people have different personas to show
different groups of friends. And while he didn’t tell me that was
fake, not genuine or otherwise uncool, he said that might not
have happened to me if I had had Facebook. I could’ve stayed
genuine to myself, and communicated that coherently to all of my
friends.
Instead of just losing touch with them. Yes, unlike the Facebook
generation, I’m having a heck of a time tracking down my
important college friends. My Japan trip was partly about that,
since most of the old contact information I had was destroyed in a
house fire 3 years ago. How quaint ‘eh? Yes, I wrote it on paper,
with a pen. Fortunately, the Facebook is backed up against the
loss of your little book of contact information to fire. Or of your
cell phone to theft. Or of your laptop’s hard drive to failure. You
96 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
don’t have to worry about these, as long as your important friends
continue to value the network.
So Zuck seems to have solved the problem of immediately losing
touch with your school mates, by effectively enabling people to
stay in loose touch over remote distances. So when he sees some
additional communication problem, it would seem natural to him
that the Facebook can and will solve it. The solution is to build
Facebook in a way that avoids the problem, and then the problem
will no longer exist once everyone uses the Facebook. Completely
reasonable, right?
To look at the limits of how much people will adapt to use a
product, contrasted against how much a product should evolve to
serve its people, let’s revisit the “a person has multiple personas
or profiles to show different people” issue. If real communication
means that a person is genuine and real to everyone looking at
his profile, then it means that he should have one single,
consistent profile. Otherwise he is either lying or at least not
revealing the full truth about himself to someone, which is
imperfect communication. So if Facebook doesn’t allow that,
people will remain consistent to all of their online connections.
Major social communication problem solved, and thank you again
Facebook.
Maybe. Will people naturally change their social behavior, in line
with new tools? Sometimes yes, as now I and most technophiles
loathe waiting days for a snail mail response, and have fully
replaced personal letters with email, and may even be going
Karel Baloun 97
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
digital with Holiday and Event cards, which would radically change
their content.
Only if the social function is deemed better, will it be adopted. IM
seems preferable to email, on the same criteria of speed and
availability. However it has partially crashed on the rocks of
making users too available, and now some IM clients allow users
to show a different status message to customizable groups of
users, and some IM users have resorted to always leaving their
status as “busy” or “offline”, contacting others only by initiating
the message. While talking a voice phone call is much faster than
typing, IM leaves a searchable conversation record, and lets me
talk to more than one person about different things at the same
time.
So is a single “persona” better communication?
Well, it is certainly more simple. Some would say that means it is
better, and invoke principles like Occam’s Razor. But what if
communication is naturally, properly, better when it is complex?
Maybe. Maybe relationships will continue to be more complex
than any tool created to manage them. But I’m just a guy, so I
never understand human relationships anyway.
Zuck, I'm told, has no material clutter in his life, and sleeps on a
mattress. He certainly has no clutter in the office. There is his
small white ibook (like Aaron) and not much else. Aaron
decorates his ibook with stickers, but Zuck’s is plain white, like
his “interrogation room” named closed office.
98 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
I speculate that Zuck has no need (at this time) for material stuff,
because his life is full, with Facebook. He is satisfied. Also, for
busy executives it is beyond obvious that whatever is stacked
somewhere will never be used, but that’s actually true for
everyone. Engineers didn’t used to be like that. I remember when
you weren’t an engineer without a shelf full of O’Reilly books,
which you’ve read and refer to regularly, and piles of hardware
(which you built into robots and stuff in your spare time) and
technical magazines and software which show that you are in the
information flow. Now real engineers seem to have nothing on
their desks, and I too am slowly abandoning paper. What
happened?
Finally smart people have reached and come66 to terms with
information overload, and O’Reilly is turning to Safari virtual
bookshelf, and a PDF distribution channel. At facebook, most
engineers have empty desks, or just a few notes which get
naturally thrown away. I wonder if they’ve really simplified, or has
the clutter just moved online, onto virtual desktops covered with
icons, and onto thousands of backend servers.
Clutter is bad, whether it is on a desk, on your laptop’s desktop,
or spread for you throughout the internet. 500 friends is clutter.
Karel Baloun 99
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
66 I’m coming! Wait up! If I can do it, anyone can. When I was a high
school debater, we had to cart around our 10 boxes of paper evidence. Even after
a house fire taught me that “stuff doesn’t really matter”, I’m re-reading How to
Simplify your Life (a Great book) and Again clearing off my desk.
Having overlapping unconnected friends on 5 social networks is
clutter. But good, rich complexity isn’t always clutter.
It’s okay to have your photos on Flickr and your videos on
Youtube and your personal information on your own Yahoo
hosted website, because each one is better and cheaper at its core
service. It’s okay to go to several search engines when looking for
something, because they really are different, and diversity is
good. A google-only world would really suck, as an M$FT world
came really close to sucking. And as social networks move into
more vertical niches, with specialized tools and features for each
one, you may find your internet social life is complex. But having
the same information in 5 social networks is clutter, so I predict
successful social networks will collaborate.
How do we deal with the reality of Friend clutter? In the real
world, we do it by ignoring people. I resolved my college friend
clutter by losing touch with everyone from college. That’s sad.
But I get by. Will I do that again with my current circle of friends
that happens to be centered around my kids’ school? Do I do that
every time I change jobs? Or with my church community every
time I leave? Is this why Americans have so few real, deep,
lifelong friends? Is it just Americans or Homo Modernus? In Japan
also, as people lose their rural connection to place, and their life
long employment system connection to company, the lifelong
friendships everyone had and had taken for granted are
weakening.
100 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
Facebook ensures (as long as people use it) that we’ll never lose
touch with our old friends. They’ll just stay at the bottom of my
500 person deep friends list, and Facebook with fancy algorithms
will figure out what information I care about within that huge
mash of activity among my 500 friends.
However, having a pile of 500 anything is clutter. On google I
have a pile of billions of items, but I never get to see it, since
google shows me only a beautifully simple single box that will
fulfill all my wishes. Google with gmail is trying to do that for me
with my email, where the “archive” button means “don’t worry
son, just let go”. Today on Facebook, I can’t archive my friends,
and it would be rude, sad and maybe wasteful to delete them,
so... even if it is someone I don’t care about anymore, if they
update their profile every day, they are at the top of “MyFriends”.
On LinkedIn I have 270 connections, all of people i really know,
and on facebook I have almost 100, and I have at least 100-200
friends and acquaintances who aren’t on any social network yet,
so I need help organizing this clutter. Among people I know, the
main online strategies I see are “respond when contacted” and
“contact when you need something” and “find interesting person
to chat with when bored” and (years ago) “bond with my target hot
chick and all friends of this hot chick”. These strategies don’t
scale, are not especially nice, and probably wouldn’t really get me
what I most want in life. If I used Facebook heavily, I’d lose touch
with people who are not on the system, even if they are more
Karel Baloun 101
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
interesting or important, just like I have a hard time staying in
touch with friends who don’t use email.
Currently, social networks have really been successful in niche
social segments, with Myspace comprised of overlap from the
music/entertainment, young, and sex-driven segments67.
Myspace is an open network, where any member can see and
friend any other member, which allows for this overlap to exist,
where members from different segments presumably successfully
ignore each other. Closed networks like Facebook serve their
target segments well, and need to figure out the cross network
overlap, both on their own site and across the internet.
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