Bryan Williams

Previous Post Facebook and Twitter Sinking Ships

Posted: May 18th, 2010 in Design, Rants, Web Development. No Comments

Say someone you knew was throwing a big party out on a small yacht. The invitation started among friends, the food was good, the atmosphere was fantastic and everyone had a really great time. It went so well in fact that this friend decided to throw another similar party. All the guests had such a great time that they in turn invited a whole lot of their friends. The boat was starting to get crowded, but having more people also made it in a lot of cases more fun. That party went so successful that the boat owner decided they should do it again and this time invite anyone and everyone they could find and a lot of the guests did the same. The more the merrier right? So this time the it’s packed. All of a sudden the party isn’t so fun anymore. Instead of atmosphere, guests can’t even move. In fact it’s crossed the line to straight-up dangerous. The weight and person limit is way beyond recommended and a lot of the guests at the party at this point don’t even understand what it’s like to be on a boat. In an attempt to make the experience more fun, it’s created a dangerous situation that could even risk sinking the entire yacht.

I think in the same fashion, bandwagon followers will sink the Facebook and Twitter ship.

More and more products and brands are trying to leverage the success and usefulness of Facebook and Twitter for their own good. It seems you can’t look too many places and not see a little blue F and/or a little blue T that indicate you can share or somehow use this experience to share with your social circle. Let’s face it, they are everywhere. Even a lot of places they simply shouldn’t be. While I at first welcomed and embraced having those kinds of tools and appreciated the one-source approach, the more I have seen lately is leading me to believe that the bandwagon mentality is going to sink the ship.

Let me be the first to say I love using Facebook and Twitter. I use Facebook to keep mostly in touch with family and friends and have used Twitter pretty much from the moment I heard about it. I have multiple accounts that I use for different sites and of course my main one that I updated frequently from my phone. So I’m definitely on the ship. I don’t want this to be a, “It ain’t like it used to be,” rant. I think it’s absolutely necessity that things like this evolve and grow as needs and uses change. So I put together some clear points I want to make on why I think Facebook and Twitter, as they are now, will be sunk by over-popularity.

1. The people who make the decisions don’t actually use it themselves: Hands down biggest reason why I think this stuff will fail. I work as a web developer on a lot of different projects and quite frankly I’m getting scared at how many people are asking for Facebook and Twitter integration. Web designers are sprinkling little social icons all over psd mocks with little to no thought on how they will actually be used. It’s a buzz word, but the people who make decisions on what get coded into a website are not actually using these tools themselves. Anyone who uses the service would understand they don’t want your crap on their feed. Or how users would actually want to integrate with the content. More time is put into how it is marketed rather than the actual use.
2. Marrying your product or brand to a 3rd-party service is always risky: Associating with these brands and leveraging their tools and services is a marketing marketing strategy but almost always imposes technical limitations and risks. Like I mentioned marketers and designers love to see those little shades of blue on everything. The problem is though that many sites are integrating a lot using Facebook’s API and what happens when Facebook crashes or a service gets changed? Your product or brand is swept away in that too. You forfeit control and now rely on someone who isn’t necessarily tied to you. I’ve seen a couple really big clients and sites be rendered useless because Facebook decided to change their API and not tell anyone until after-the-fact or a bug on their side.
3. Loss of context: So much emphasis is being put on integrating all of the pieces of your life into a one-stop-shop, but one of the biggest complaint I hear is that pieces are losing context. Not just messages that are meant for some people are being misinterpreted by others. But it’s a fact that we don’t want to share everything in our lives with everyone we know. Information and our lives require context. When you loose context it all becomes a jumbled mess. And if you’ve looked at your facebook feed any more you’ll see what I mean. It’s filled with games, applications, statuses, pictures, notes, links, tags, groups and all manner of things fighting for your attention and the space but they almost all lack context.

Several years ago I had the pleasure and opportunity to visit with a number of communication related companies in New York City. They ranged from book publishers, to magazine writers, to public relation firms. They all said the same thing, learn about the internet. It is clear that the internet is changing how we communicate and learn. Along the way there will always be people coming up with new ways to do this and I’ll be the first to admit Facebook and Twitter has its uses. It fills a very important purpose. They wouldn’t be so big if they didn’t. But it’s also important to know that no system is perfect and there will always be issues.

I think there will be a shift very soon. A shift away from these one-stop-shopping style solutions and back to systems that preserve context. Where content creators can have full control on their user experience and good marketers, designers, and producers will design systems that meet the needs of their audiences directly. It will be a global scale system, but all will be used to go back to more niche groups and content. Combine these needs with a lot of recent outcry over privacy and I can see either the ship sinking soon or at least everyone bailing off the boat.

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