In our blog post last week discussing the New System For Facebook Wall Posts, we suggested that “…not every change Facebook makes is right. And if this one proves unfeasible it won’t be the first time Facebook has tried something then made adjustments to accommodate users.” Sure enough, very likely in response to the backlash at the removal of reverse chronological order as the default for Wall posts, Facebook has added a Most Recent filter in a very visible place at the top of Fan Pages, so that users can again view posts in the way they’re used to viewing them.
End of story? Not really. The fact remains that, as passionate as its users are about the platform in its current state, Facebook is almost surely going to continue making updates and, as we stressed last week, it’s important to try to understand how the changes they make might be an improvement, even when it turns out they are not.
We’ve been hearing quite a bit about how difficult it is to keep up with all the changes on Facebook, and one of the important roles that a company like Involver can play in this is to insulate our customers from these changes, which is why we make it as simple as possible for users to deploy our applications without having to worry about changes on Facebook. But we also think its important to help our customers understand what it is that drives a company like Facebook to keep tinkering with something which, as far as most of its 500 million plus users are concerned, works just fine.
Agile Development
One of our working practices at Involver for software development, and now our marketing department (also see Involver & Agile Marketing), is something called “Agile.” Agile is based on the idea of product evolution through iterations or small experiments, as opposed to a few large bets. This style of working is especially suitable to the software industry, where few products arrive on the market fully baked, and the input and feedback of users (from beta testers to customers to fellow employees) allows producers to evolve and improve their products to meet the ever-growing expectations of a demanding and competitive market.
It’s not surprising that Facebook, with a CEO who is also a developer, would operate in a similar fashion, launching new versions, changing settings, and absorbing ideas and functionalities from potential competitors. Google certainly does this, as does Apple and just about every other successful technology company. It may be more annoying on Facebook, because people’s own identities are so deeply integrated with the platform.
Another principal of Agile is that it’s okay to fail, just don’t do it twice in the same way. So was this a failure? Perhaps, but if we think about what Facebook was trying to accomplish, it may be more properly viewed as a misstep or possibly even a step that users simply weren’t properly prepared for. Facebook’s intention, clearly, was to improve the way in which Wall posts are viewed. What they missed was to include a simple way for users to choose to view posts in the way they had before–in reverse chronological order. Users reacted, and Facebook made an adjustment to accommodate them.
If there’s a benefit in this entire exercise, and we believe there is, it’s that we now understand more fully that, just as with email or documents on our desktops, there are lots of different ways to view Wall posts. And just as we, as individuals, like to set our defaults or toggle between the options, Facebook, in its two-steps-forward, one-step-back way, is somehow on its way to finding a better way to allow us to do that.
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