[jeswin]

On the contrary, I think this is about FaceBook knowing exactly what the future holds.

- FB probably recognizes that a Social Network is at its core a directory of connections and the ability to message/talk to each other. Until now it took a backseat to over-shared content, when it should have been the other way round.

- This app could serve as the foundation for the next FaceBook. Once you strip down an app to its essentials, you can very carefully add features based on data and the lessons learned.

- We are moving towards more selective, opt-in types of engagement, as opposed to carpet bombing with the content feed. For example, there are only a couple of dozen people whose feeds I care about. Those are most likely the people who I interact with or message often. What I want is the ability to mark certain people as "interesting" so that I see their statuses, instead of having to "hide" everybody else. (add:) Same with groups, follows etc.

[pekk]

> FB probably recognizes that a Social Network is at its core a directory of connections and the ability to message/talk to each other

How many years of hype did it take to bring us to this moment, where we realized we had reinvented ICQ/AIM?

I know, I know, I'm being reductive. There is also a sort of Geocities thing bolted on. You know, like Friendster and Myspace

[taiki]

if ICQ was so wonderful to use then why did we flee to the next best thing to come along? My feeling was that ICQ sucked in a very horrible way.

I was never around for the Friendster days(I was a Livejoural user through and through, damn it), however the reason I suspect MySpace lost out is that they did do the GeoCities thing. Everytime I see people complaining about a new Facebook layout, I always think, "Is this worse than the best MySpace page?" Answer is always no.

It's not that we're reinventing ICQ or AIM or MySpace or whatever, it's that we're refining the, oh god I hate using this word, "experience" of using it.

Does Facebook have random flash things pegging my CPU to render a cube in 3D with my friend's vacation photos on each face? Does Facebook have auto-playing music? Does Facebook have the option of setting the page's colors to be hideously garish?

I also think Facebook is realizing this, and they're trying to retool their business away from Facebook this website you visit, to Facebook a thing where all of these neat services are wired up to. I don't know if they'll succeed, but at least they have the sense to know they're not going to be on top forever.

[funkyy]

MySpace lost because it lost war to spam. Majority of regular users were just fed up with freaking spam. Tens of comments, invites, messages mass sent from some unknown wannabes. Facebook offered more closed approach - focusing on real life friends and trying to tackle the spam. Remember having 500 friends on MySpace? How many of them have you EVER seen in real life? 10-20% ?

[visakanv]

It was also getting really tedious and laggy, and there were lots of fake profiles. I used both MySpace (I played in a band) and Facebook in 2007, for seemingly different reasons and different groups of friends... but eventually everyone moved to Facebook and MySpace got really vacant.

[saraid216]

> and there were lots of fake profiles

FYI, this is a feature, not a bug. One of MySpace's early differentiators was that it allowed fake profiles, unlike Friendster.

Another differentiator was the extreme level of customization available, which as you note, resulted in a lot of lag because most people do not even realize that could be an issue.

[jquery]

> Does Facebook have random flash things pegging my CPU to render a cube in 3D with my friend's vacation photos on each face? Does Facebook have auto-playing music? Does Facebook have the option of setting the page's colors to be hideously garish?

No, Facebook has successfully homogenized the identity of individuals. Every person's page is the exact same professional-looking franchise restaurant. BORING. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if people could make their pages individualized in a thoughtful way. Few people are asking them to allow Flash or go full MySpace. Perhaps instead, a library of curated themes, or even fully custom CSS (that could be turned off), a la subreddits.

[taiki]

I don't want my system to crawl or my eyes to burn because someone decided that yellow on white or white on yellow or yellow on magenta was a good idea or that having a song from 2006 auto play whenever i browsed to someone's page was a good idea or...

If you want all of that, build yourself a home page. Tumblr and Livejournal did it right by offering ways to view someone's account with out their idea of what good taste is. Still, between NO customization and customization, I'll take the bland option.

It works great on Reddit for subreddits because if you get it wrong, you can just move to another subreddit or find a moderator who knows a thing or two about CSS.

I can't just up and find friends who aren't fucking colorblind.

[forgottenpass]

ICQ was so wonderful to use then why did we flee to the next best thing to come along?

For the same reason we joined ICQ in the first place. Hype, incremental improvement, playing with new toys, and some of our friends were there but not on the previous thing we used.

ICQ did suck. It sucked the way most things suck: given the environment and state of the product at the time of release, they sucked less than other things on at least one metric.

[themusicgod1]

I'm getting reports from multiple contacts that Facebook is putting autoplaying music videos in strategic places. Very myspace-ish.

[ctdonath]

The issue isn't technical. That's why attempts at technical solutions reinvent ICQ et al.

The problem with social media (which leads to the demise of every implementation in around 7 years) isn't the media, it's the social.

The problem with social media is modeling degree of interesting. Everyone joins a social media site because the people in a defined group (however that is implemented) are interesting. Over time people join the group, and some leave; alas, those joining tend to be less interesting than whoever was there (and attracted participants), the interesting people tend to leave because they're surrounded by ever more uninteresting people (and find more interesting people elsewhere), traffic increases, signal-to-noise ratio decreases, average level of interesting plummets, people leave because it's boring, cycle repeats elsewhere. Insofar as the site is a directory of connections, participants find their list is dominated by people they don't know/care, but as nobody wants to perform the cruel step of actually sever connections, nor wants to spend the considerable time required to do so, they leave for somewhere fresh (hey, the old account is still available if they want to contact someone, but that ends up just being neglected). Eventually one leaves a trail of abandoned accounts, still active but ID & password - even the site itself - forgotten.

FB has tried to solve this with some algorithm filtering thru activity of friends, leading to a disjointed slate of postings which is interesting enough to casually browse, but suffers from a still low S/N ratio and leaves it almost impossible to find an interesting post short of scrolling thru hundreds of disorganized items. Result is an experience just interesting enough to keep people checking FB, but not exactly useful.

"Upvoting" helps identify interesting posts/users, but that's the decision of the voters, not the reader.

So...someone creates yet another social media site, using some new tech to change the media or voting or ranking or filtering or something ... and it all goes thru the same social media lifecycle, dying when the S/N ratio reduces the activity to little more than yet another directory of connections.

Give me a way to filter those who are interesting to me, with some visual gradient that I can read or skip sections of as I read based on momentary whim. HN's gradients are a useful step, but in the wrong direction: I don't just want the bad posts faded out depending on how many object, I want the higher ranking posts more visible (not just in position but in gradient, as sometimes great high-rated posts are positioned low just because they respond to some mediocre parent); sometimes the most down voted posts are interesting for visceral "train wreck" appeal.

Figure out how to find out what/who I find interesting. Keep what I see interesting, and I'll stick around. Otherwise, it's just the next ICQ directory.

[dpcheng2003]

Completely agree. Facebook's feed is its most valuable real estate and it's primarily used for photo-sharing. If you "carpet bomb" it with requests and gaming spam, it becomes irrelevant.

The discrete separation of Facebook apps may solve the problem that companies like Yahoo are facing (to some extent): The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

If you want an 11 minute read, I covered this at great length in a blog post two weeks ago on Medium: https://medium.com/p/b3c97b87a183 (4.4K views and counting).

[Raphael]

It just goes to show how inflexible Facebook is. In a flexible system, it would be trivial to create a custom feed out of other feeds. Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader both did this.

[superuser2]

Not really. You've been able to create lists of select friends for at least a couple years.

[superuser2]

This has existed for several years in the form of the Close Friends list.