MattMaroon.com

I have to say that after being an app developer on Facebook for a while, I’m gaining an appreciation for them as a company. While I still don’t see them as “the next Google” as everyone loves to call them, I admire their boldness.

Reading this article about Google’s Visual Design lead, who is moving on to Twitter, and the ensuing conversation about it over on Hacker News, made me realize how fearful many successful businesses are of shaking things up. One commenter on HN said:

When I started at Google Nov. ’06 Doug had created some awesome Gmail mockups that really took the design and functionality above and beyond and — having heard about how ground up Goog worked — I was thinking those designs would be acted upon and built in the coming months and I was excited about using that Gmail.

When I left end of last year, the mockups were still being iterated on, and the only thing that had been built based on those mockups were the buttons. Gmail’s just too big, as are search and ads, and UX is too disorganized and outnumbered to have any say.

I think a lot of people fall into this trap. I know I have. When you have a lot of customers (and we’ve got a fraction of a percent of the number Facebook does) you realize quickly that any change you make is going to be met with a lot of complaints, and the bigger the change, the more vocal they’ll be. It creates a serious form inertia and scares you into leaving well enough alone.

The problem is the conflict between what a business would define as an improvement and what its customers would. While all business share the same scoreboard, money, customers don’t really care about that. They want a site that fits certain needs, and once they find one, changes are often unwelcome. Changes that give your site a broader appeal often make it less appealing to the early adopters. Even if they will come to like it in time, their aversion to change in a service they already love can often cause a near-term firestorm.

Given all that, I think relative to a lot of other companies, Facebook has been pretty ballsy. Not just in their famously spurning large acquisition offers, but also in their willingness to push improvements that they feel will benefit them in the long run but that cause them a lot of grief in the short term.

As with any form of gambling, sometimes one doesn’t work out. Beacon was a pretty spectacular example of that. I’m still not sure how they thought that one would work. My 11 year old cousin would have realized that idea was idiotic. But they at least dealt with that well and it’s now largely forgotten.

And while there have been a few misfires, there’ve been a few successes as well. When they introduced the mini-feed and some other forms of public information, lots of current customers were pissed and there was a very big backlash. They liked the site how it was just fine, and we’re a little nervous about the changes. But Facebook did a pretty good job of allowing people to set privacy settings, and of configuring the default ones, and then of explaining it to customers (something they should have done right off the bat) and in time people grew to love it. Now that sort of stuff is now what people visit the site for, it’s the prime reason for the tremendous engagement they see. Without those features they’d be just another Myspace wannabe.

The new home page (and the new Facebook in general) are examples of big gambles too, and while the smoke hasn’t entirely cleared yet, I think they’re going to be long-term successes. While as an app developer I absolutely despise the new home page (which removes them from the right side, and seems to have caused an overall traffic dip for games on the platform) and the new Facebook (which has had an even more deleterious effect on apps in general) as a Facebook user I vastly prefer both.

But whether or not they work out in the end, I’m impressed that they even tried it. It’s hard making bold changes to an application that has 150 million users and is gaining hundreds of thousands of new ones each day. It’s hard to not roll it back immediately when the complaints start flooding in. But in the long run, it’s that sort of gamble that separates the Facebooks from the Orkuts. It’s easy for a new service like Gmail to boldly go where no web-based email has gone before, it’s hard for the Gmail that’s been around for 5 years and is the third or fourth largest service (and possibly the fastest growing) to make sweeping changes.

And I have to say that on the whole, I’m inspired by it. It’s something I think we need to do more of at Blue Frog Gaming. We often find ourselves, when evaluating a change, saying things like “we’re going to get flooded with complaints over that one” or “the customers who bought hundreds of dollars worth of commissioner points are going to be pissed”. But we can’t let that stop us from improving. We have to do what is best for our games in the long term, and if that means some unhappy customers in the short run, well, that’s what economists call creative destruction.

This entry was posted on March 20, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under tech . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.