Facebook will struggle to make the next leap (IMHO, of course) because there's a disconnect between how users want to use it, and how Facebook wants/needs you to use it.
Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.
Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with everyone. People are learning that's a lot of work.
The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- has to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.
Facebook's user model changed completely when it introduced the news feed. Before that, users spent a lot of time "curating" their profile pages with favorite books, movies, etc., while updating status only occasionally ("dbot is ..."). Visiting someone's page was more like going over and knocking on their door. You would learn a lot about that person and what they've been up to.
Enter the news feed - which was hugely unpopular at first - and is more like walking into a public square, with ads, vendors, and people on soapboxes. Some people don't like to be so public in the way they share, and other people's interesting stuff gets lost in the crowd.
The Facebook of today isn't the one I signed up for, which is fine, but also explains why I use it less now.
This is probably a generational thing, but I don't care about being watched. If I am, that information doesn't go on Facebook, in an email, in a text, and perhaps even not in a phone call.
Facebook is getting impersonal without a competent list/circles system. I find myself texting or messaging content to people more than posting it on my wall because I want to be selective about who views it.
Sometimes these are stories about the cute girl I talked to at Starbucks or a service I'm loving. Sometimes it's a personal story with little branding value. But I naturally have both types of conversations and so don't see the mutual exclusivity between encouraging conversation and getting data.
Similarly, the problem with friending everyone goes away with a decent lists/circles concept - I add a lot more people on Google+ (granted, I don't post anything there. But I'd like to).
I'm seeing similar things on Facebook. A group of my friends is in a Facebook group that was originally intended for a business purpose. It is still used for that, but we also frequently post things there that we want to share to a small audience and not broadcast to all Facebook contacts.
I disagree about Facebook potentially struggling because of this disconnect. Facebook can continue to grow by steering users toward doing what Facebook wants while intermittently rewarding them with what users want. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_rein...
Addiction is not proportional to the quality of the user experience.
Agreed. I think G+ could beat Facebook here as they don't need to directly monetise the service and can provide more of the platform people want. Whether or not they can get to a tipping point of users however is another question.
Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.
Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with everyone. People are learning that's a lot of work.
The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- has to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.