This is not a post about open, about standards, about privacy, or really any criticism of Facebook in any way. In fact, the problem is just how unbelievable the Facebook team is (in a good way). The sheer strength of their talent is almost unmatched in our industry, past and present. The problem is, all that talent is building something I just don’t care about, and no one is left for anything else.
Facebook doesn’t provide me with anything useful.
When it comes to staying connected to the people I care about, they either live with me, I talk to them on the phone weekly, or have an annual dinner when I visit Israel or New York. This is just enough for me. There is a reason why I am not in touch with people from high school, the army, or film school. We all moved on, became different people, changed context, and lost the common thread that united us at the time. My personal Facebook experience of finding long lost friends is mostly a short awkward exchange followed by a one sided stream of useless information.
When it comes to content, I much rather rely on the editorial board of the New York Times for my news, than what my “friends” find interesting. The idea that people I care about are in any way relevant to my news consumption has never produced useful results. When it comes to news, I want to be “friend” with the editors of the New York Times, and when it comes to buying a digital camera, the reviewers at DPReview.
My family and friends are uniformly challenged when it comes to world affairs or digital cameras. Maybe it is just me, but in my offline world, information and sharing works perfectly fine without Facebook. As for casual chatting, games, and leaving comments on people’s photos – I choose to spend my free time doing something else. Instead of dealing with people’s shit, I rather handle chicken shit.
I am in no way suggesting that almost 600 million people are wrong. The massive and highly engaged Facebook user base clearly gets value and satisfaction from the product. I am also in no way critical or judgmental about those who find value there. Good for them! But for me, there are so many other unsolved problems in the world, and they have little to do with social.
Last month at Open Web Foo, sitting outside with about a dozen of some really smart and highly connected folks, I asked people to name three “wow” experiences they had with new web products in the last year. Most had none to share. I asked them to think back 3 years and the list filled up in minutes.
Forget about solving the world’s problem – if you don’t care for Facebook, the web it just boring. It’s stale.
There are many reasons why engineers want to work for Facebook, from the potential windfall to learning just how they are able to ship so much technology so fast. It is an engineering dreamland. But there is one great reason why they shouldn’t: because Facebook will be great without them, but the web might not.
Even though we don’t work together anymore, we can still be friends on Facebook!
Great post. And I agree with “When it comes to content, I much rather rely on the editorial board of the New York Times for my news, than what my “friends” find interesting.”. However consider that there may be people out there who have an interesting take on some area of interest to you, who are simply reading news and sharing. It’s extremely unlikely that your group of friends is the same group as your ideal set of amateur news editors.
Through Google Reader sharing I’ve found many interesting “minds” – I don’t know the people, they’re not my friends, but I get turned on to interesting content, a little each day. I have enough of these shared feeds that I feel no need to read the NYT, and the news I get is 10x more interesting.
There is some kind of “future” in that formula. I think it’s very much underexploited by Reader, but they do a comptent job.
You struck a chord with how I’m feeling but my intuition tells me the larger problem is in the implementation details. The fact that social platforms still generally express my relationships as publicly accessible booleans shows a lack of richness. Groups and lists are hacks which are meant to compliment an organic process we perform effortlessly. If you boil down the question of “What is social data?” to “Connection between you and all nouns” amplifying your web experience by utilizing social data is unavoidable.
You have a connection to the editorial board of the NY Times and even though they are not your friends or family or High School mates there is still something very meaningful and useful about describing that connection. Bookmarks, Feeds, Likes, Fans, Friends — this data is too flat!
I often get useful information via facebook. I keep in touch with people I normally would have to drop altogether from my life, I show off and see pictures from around the world, get invited to and post events from birthday parties and poker games to SQL study groups and social track days, get introduced to new people, read interesting exchanges that might normally confined to e-mail, let people know when something important has happened in my life, communicate with my kids, get music and movie recommendations, and WAY more. I do this in about 10 minutes a day, a few times a week. I’m not committed to the platform, and have other things (like last.fm for music) that I can use to achieve the same ends, but overall its a very positive experience for almost no time commitment and nearly everyone I know is active and full of fun and useful information on a daily basis. I can read everything and communicate back, usually on a 10 minute walk while at work, from my smartphone.
I had a friend say, once, that if you’re not getting an interesting information feed on facebook and twitter, you are following the wrong people. I think she’s right. The platform itself isn’t the problem if there is nothing interesting happening on it, its the people you’re connected to. I can’t imagine having a friend that I didn’t think had some interesting things to reccommend or say.
Regarding your comment that there are more important problems to be dealing with…are you sure? We could be addressing world hunger, but if we can keep ourselves feeling connected, loved, and part of a community in only a few minutes per day, doesn’t that leave us free to solve world hunger instead of spending all our time maintaining every relationship we have in an offline way? Of course we should still do those offline things like having dinner, but don’t discount the value of people feeling that they’re a part of their social group, or we’d all have to stop doing ANY social activity because there will always be bigger problems in the world.
Excellent post. The post said exactly what I was thinking.
Great post. Reminds me of a recent Chris Dixon post. http://cdixon.org/2010/02/11/every-time-an-engineer-joins-google-a-startup-dies/ Every time a smart kid joins a Mckinsey/Goldman/Google a startup dies…
FB serves it’s purpose. Personally, I feel bad for people who are always reachable via FB chat. Twitter is the same way though. It’s ok at what it’s designed for. I would rather pick up a newspaper than walk into a crowd of people and listen to synopsis of what they are talking about.
You basically explained to us that we had social networks before the invention of the Internet and Facebook. If Facebook is not useful to you I only have one big advice : don’t use it.
you are right..and i use Fb for fun and chatting, never take it seriously
the irony is that you are using twitter/facebook to reach more people to share your thought!
Offering visitors the ability to share interesting articles is a useful features to those already using those services. I don’t find new items to read on social services, but that doesn’t mean others don’t find it very useful. I get almost no traffic from such sources, so this is more about providing a service than self promotion.
Hi. Sorry about bad english. Congratulation. Great Post. I am brazilian and the “Facebook effect” came early here, thru Orkut. Are closer than 4 million users from Facebook, and 25 million users from Orkut. Since 2003 in Brazil, Orkut just rules our country. But is the same idea: why so many people wants to ´connect´ with other? I have no answer. Most of my ´friends´ from Orkut lived your own lives, with or without me. Share photos, play games, and so many other resources does not increase my experience with people i really care.
In the past 2 years i worked in a single ERP project. As every brazilian knows, the taxes rules changing everytime, asking a really good programmer. I just wondering, if this ‘massive’ brilliant talents from Facebook worked in a program who increase the productivity in any area, how mutch we will gain with that? A lot. Really Sad all this talent wasted.
Your generation may not use it. But the future gen is sharing stuff with their friends on these sites and these social groups are growing together. It is an integral part of life for them. Just imagine, what will be their life 10 years down the road – if they write a blog of FB/twitter and their usage of it.
I don’t know if I totally agree. “Friends” is quite a misleading term on Facebook. At best, most of them are acquaintances. I know people with about 2,000 “friends”; really? I recently posted a question on my wall to see what kind of responses I would get, and that was: “what’s the largest number of ‘friends’ you can have before you start losing track?” You really can’t keep track of that many people – nor should you. I routinely examine who are my “friends” and remove the ones that I know I’m not going to associate with in any way.
Heck, how many LinkedIn connections do you have? I think I have too many, and it’s not really getting me anywhere.
Not sure what you are trying to say. FB has great technology, is changing the way people connect, and it will take the best of the best to continue to evolve secure sharing of information. Go FB.
I don’t think the kind of sharing FB promotes is that meaningful to society.
I somewhat agree you Sir.
But there are a lot of things that makes my agreement 100% in your favour.
The worst thing is, the Facebook friends disappoints me, they don’t behave the way they are, the original way.
A lot of time and money is what unknowingly wasted from my side towards facebook.
I have started to hate it,but unable to ignore the fact that it’s the most important thing which helps,
1. to share my current info with people,
2. my work and other activities in which other people could be involved,
3. being in contact with those who can prove beneficial in return.,
and a lot more things.
So, the result is that I’ll have to go with it, by changing the way I am, and leaving the rest on them.
Thank You Eran Sir for being concerned about the community, for us, for everyone.
I see what you mean here and I would in return: The world doesn’t really need another advert either, but Google spends a great deal of effort doing that so it can reap a 26B revenue stream. The interesting thing they’ve done is reuse that money to solve other problems in Energy, Production, etc. beyond search. It’s not a great example, but I hope you see elements of my rationale.
So whereas I understand that FB in it’s current status may not be directly helpful, it’s quite possible that it can be soon.
I respectfully disagree. I do find Facebook valuable. I enjoy discovering what my friends are doing online and I believe that many derive much value from the service. I also disagree that nothing major happen in the past 3 years. Can you share the list of companies that you came up with 3 years ago? Also, check out this post – maybe its relevant? http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304392704576375473021288898-lMyQjAxMTAxMDEwMjExNDIyWj.html
Congratz for this post, really interesting. For all the commenters whose purpose in life is defend a corporation who doesn’t give a damn for their “sharing and relationships” but instead research for a way of how to make profit out of your life, let me tell you: this post is about how smart people is loosing their interest in solve real life problems and how fb is retaining this potential for other ends. This post never said fb was a broken service or anything like that, do you really think there’s anything else to add to fb that drastically would change the way we perceive social networks? Actually every big corporation end up being evil, and buying the great ideas instead of producing them. But at least some of them are trying to research in other fields (project planning, medicine, collaboration, politics) and are not stuck in the same circle (how many more pixels should I take to put more advertisement). I really enjoy my fb experience but I also think they should be using this great people to create more services (not only putting a “new” theater viewer for my pictures)
Great post, it shapes almost perfectly my opinion about FB.
Facebook just helped people topple cause a revolution and topple a government
Pretty powerful me thinks
If only you had the facebook Like button on here I would have pressed it and you’d have had a few extra readers! (seriously – good post)
I do have ‘Share on FB’…
What are you talking about? Facebook was a tool used to help over throw the Egyptian govt. How is that not useful? Through it’s use the Middle East most likely will improve have a better quality of life.
OK so it’s not useful to you, but to over 600 million it is. Get over yourself!
What brilliant people? They work in PHP and their JavaScript is incompetent. So are their APIs! I wouldn’t work at Facebook if Zuckerberg offered me every penny of cash and every share of stock.
Completely agree with your post. Facebook works on the human element of being curious. It can be about your friends lives, professional lives, checking out potential dates and what not. Would like to have a post about problems on the web or in general which you think needs more attention from Engineers.
Give it a few more years. Facebook will stop being seen as such a hot property and chunks of talent will break off and do amazing things. Weatherbill was started by some former googlers.
“The sheer strength of their [the Facebook team's] talent is almost unmatched in our industry, past and present.”
I do not doubt that every employee at Facebook is a competent (or even fairly smart) person, but I kind of doubt they are the most talented people in the software industry. Most of them have not created anything mind-blowing, and many of them are simply employees because they are one or two degrees of separation from Zuckerberg or Harvard/Stanford alumni.
The fact that they are *employees* is a dead give away – if they are really talented, they would not be working for someone else, especially for the trivial amount of (or lack of) stock that most of them are given.
i always had the same feeling about fb, glad to know that the author and so many other ppl also share the same.
I’m sceptical of your theory that a single company can suck that much talent from the industry. I’ll admit I have no knowledge of how many people facebook employs but it is not like they destroy demand for other web services. Indeed it is likely the opposite: the services facebook supplies complement and create extra demand for other innovations (that may be more aligned with your tastes).
If this is the case then there is likely to be more incentives for people to become web engineers or migrate to the US where there are high paying jobs in this industry. So unless you think talented IT people are extremely rare or it is a gift that cannot be learned then facebook have no effect of possibly stimulate the innovations you value.
From where I sit, Facebook is the black hole of talent. The very top tier.
For an 18 year old, its incredible useful for everything because everyone uses it. as you get older and your more set in your ways, its use fades.
Wow, you just put words on what I have been thinking about facebook for long time. Great that there are thinking minds out there.
I totally agree with your point about relying more on the “editorial board of the New York Times” than your friends for relevant news. I think it is really important that your views get challenged from time. However, on the whole most of my FB friends share very similar views to me. This creates a feedback loop where certain assumptions are never tested against any other. Facebook is a great way to stay in contact with friends when you move all over the world, but many of it’s other features and supposed benefits are overstated, at least in my opinion.
I’ve been saying this all along. Social has never been relevant for my searches, If my friends knew what I was searching I’d ask them directly. The same thing goes for news.
When this whole social fad is not hot anymore (after it goes IPO and many of them are rich), hopefully a big portion of those newly rich engineers will go and use that money to fund startups that will solve real problems.
A concise statement: you’re a well educated critical thinker.
Thanks for bringing this point back
http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/
Who knows, Facebook possibly has the Von Neumann or Godel of our generation working his butt off so that they can sell more clicks. It’s truly sad.
“The sheer strength of their talent is almost unmatched in our industry, past and present.”
I’ve heard other express this sentiment, and I just don’t get it. Facebook barely works. It regularly loses posts, photos, and comments. The mobile UI (Android) is missing major functionality. The privacy control set is a poster child for unusable design, and the rest of the web UI changes weekly without consistently improving.
Speaking as a professional software developer of too many years’ experience, I get the very strong impression that Facebook was rushed to market by a group of marginally competent engineers who’d never built a real distributed application before.
Can you imagine, Google, Amazon, or eBay surviving if they lost data data so frequently and cavalierly as Facebook? Can you imagine Apple, Sony, or TiVo releasing a product with Facebook’s mishmash of unthought-through features, settings, and APIs?
Your experience with Facebook must be very different from mine.
Go spend an hour with one of their senior engineer.
You’re missing something though. Many developers don’t work at facebook because they like facebook or they want to improve it, they work there because the best work there, and working with the best is the best way to improve oneself and thus increase the probability of creating a different website separate from facebook that does make the web “better”.
And that’s part of the problem. It is such an amazing place to work, people give up on their own ideas and dreams just to be part of it. And I bet some of those dreams are fantastic.
Interesting point. Maybe I can cheer you up with these observations:
1) With all that talent and money, they still have one of the lowest-quality API/platform/ecosystems of any company remotely their size. Maybe their talent is not that good, or maybe we overrate the importance of talent?
2) There are a lot of places that talent would likely work that also wouldn’t be useful to you. Ex. Maybe Microsoft (if you’re a Mac guy) or Dell, or IBM. Maybe Amazon and you don’t happen to shop there. Point being, lots of smart people work on lots of things, none of which is 100% useful to everyone.
Hello. I think the real problem is the overuse of facebook. It’s ok for quick messages but for a variety of reasons I also don’t find it useful. Unfortunately a lot of people in the web development community are over obsessed with it. The large number of comments in this post proves that maybe all of us are talking about facebook way too much when we should just carry on doing other stuff.
This post was the motivation to write some of my thoughts on the topic here: http://bit.ly/k2KtTX. You may want to take a look. Of course I’ve credited you along with another great post at the O’Reilly radar.
It could be worse though, right? These people could have gone into finance where they’d be actively harming the world, instead of going to Facebook and making something that creates no value for you (but does create value for others).
Coming from a decade working on Wall st, I have to agree with that. Yes, it could be worse.
I don’t derive much value from being on Facebook. I would venture to guess that most people don’t. My only reason for being there is that it’s a channel some folks I care about actually monitor. So most of my Facebook activity is generated by other services. I know Facebook as done some wonderful technological feats but as far as game changing methods of interaction, I don’t see it. So I agree with a lot you have to say in your post.
I will also give you one recent “wow” site that I experienced very recently. turntable.fm is probably the most fun I’ve had on the Internet in 3 years.
Brilliant. Yes, when all the “hot” aka rising stock price companies attract all the best talent, something gets lost behind. But then again, maybe the best talent is actually doing something more important. But to say that we have to redefine best as different from those people working at the hot companies…
I am certainly with you on the value of FB. My news stream is dominated by maybe four or five diehard people who just post things about themselves non-stop (it all seems a little narcissistic to me). I suppose their family is really interested given the distances between loved ones nowadays but still… The traffic on FB is far beyond Peredo distribution – a key reason why their advertising rates are god awful.
What I don’t understand, as I’m no software engineering type, is what the FB team is still doing with all those engineers. To use your question, what experience has Facebook developed in the last twelve months that really changed the way you interacted with it? I certainly understand their massive scale issues and the resources those consume and likewise that I’m not any FB pro. But I haven’t seen anything beyond the core experience that is new and notable.
Excellent post, Eran. I left Facebook just over a year ago and aside from the odd event that I can’t see I don’t miss it at all. Where you hold back from criticizing Facebook, I will: a toxic philosophy runs through both the way decisions are made there, and I fear for so many brilliant creators being taught that the way to treat users of a service is the Facebook way. It’s damaging that their talent is being drawn into something that doesn’t really do anything worthwhile, but to me, moreso that they’re being taught to use shock and awe methods of changing user behaviour.
The one thing that makes me hopeful is that part of Facebook’s DNA is that it sees people as a monoculture, and that can’t survive. It’ll just make the web less interesting until that unsustainable direction forces it to change or collapse.
I should clarify that by ‘leaving Facebook’ I mean I stopped using it; I didn’t work there.
Facebook is the best distraction. It feels good when you use it but you never realize how much you are loosing because of it. You can do so many productive thing instead of posting video and status messages on Facebook.
Facebook’s incredible engineering team produces a hell of a lot more than just the Facebook website. There are dozens of open source projects that facebook has created that help thousands of other developers do their job every day. They have helped create some of the most efficient data centers in the world. http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/
I doubt that you don’t find anything made with any of those tools useful.
[...] Facebook and Google have the most talented pool of engineers and hackers when it comes to web-based technology. They compete head-on and are known to have delivered killer products that people love to use. However, with this growth, both these tech giants have become wormholes that suck up a bunch of talent every year and at times, focus it on the same tasks. I agree with Eran Hammer-Lahav on this article. [...]
A wonderful post!
For these very reasons, I think Twitter is a lot better.
‘My facebook friends are one’s who I wished I was not friends with!
People I follow on twitter are the one’s I hope to get to know and be friends with!’
I agree, on Twitter it is actually possible to be friends with editor of NYT and other great people of out time.
Have you thought about the fact that maybe, just maybe, Facebook isn’t built for *you*? Not *you* personally, but you as a member of the average human populace. It’s obvious! Nothing can be more obvious than the fact that Facebook is built for businesses and advertisers.
Just look: would you ever need a Facebook Page for yourself? Would you ever host an ad on FB for personal reasons? Would you carry out ad campaigns and promotions on it? Would you build applications for it? No!!! A big resounding NO.
So what does this then boil down to? It boils down to the fact that Facebook isn’t built for “YOU” per se – it’s built for businesses that derive much more value from an organized group of people who are actively spending leisure time at a location where they are susceptible to advertising. This is the Facebook business model. “You” are the raw material that helps Facebook derive it’s value. Please remember that.
You certainly are right, but maybe that’s the point: maybe by forcing you an occasional glimpse at your fellow alumni’s life, you see how much you’ve changed — because they could not have gotten so far from the friends they were without you walking the same distance in the other direction; maybe having your racist (resp. radical) uncle-in-law’s rants occasionally pop-up in your News Feed helps you make sense of the Tea Party’s (resp. Green’s) view point. When Zuckerberg hints at bridging Palestinians and Israelis and toppling dictatorships, he not only has Cute-cat politics, but also sneaky ways into your distrust for cognitive dissonance.
The world could always share talent, and Facebook has trusted a lost, but also started spreading some (starting by the three co-founders). Look at what product managers do there: they invented a custom brand of data-inspired humane management. That approach is far from exclusive, but sources both its main training camp and awe-inspiring legend at Facebook. Learning from them are many people who now articulate algorithmic attention handling, usability, scrum development, constant versioning, and will continue doing that beyond they years at Facebook.
What is the alternative? Where should these folks be working?
What are you doing to see this change happen?
Do you think it’s impossible for Facebook to meet your demands?
I’m thinking Facebook just needs more time.
I’m working on something else… that’s what I’m doing.
I just think there are other problems technology can make a huge difference with which are not social. Yes, Twitter and Facebook have a big and growing impact, but they are completely focused on personal expression.
“There are many reasons why engineers want to work for Facebook, from the potential windfall to learning just how they are able to ship so much technology so fast.”
What technology? I’m a programmer, but I’ve never looked at facebook.com (seriously).
Facebook has some of the most amazing technology around. It is truly mind blowing when you talk to their engineers and get even a small picture of what it takes to power that side.
EXACTLY why I’m not on Facebook and what I tell people when they ask why…I just don’t care, there is no value for me, I don’t need Facebook to stay in touch with friends.
Your post reminds me of a quote: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” (Often attributed to Hyman Rickover, though it appears he did not originate it.)
Facebook is great for all the people who want to talk about themselves and other people. For those of us who prefer to discuss events and ideas, it is a massive waste of time.
I agree to an extent but the fact remains that I came across your great views through FB only. So it seems FB is not all that useless as u seem to think.