Facebook's Newest Problem: Being Boring

Like Yahoo, Facebook has accumulated a large base of average users. These are the people who aren't early adopters, who aren't concerned with "vision" and who dig in their heels against change.

Facebook has the choice to alienate these folks by adding "new exciting features" or keep these folks and stay what it is. Whatever "vision" is involved, Facebook will likely make a choice halfway between these results and wind-up satisfying no one and so indeed sink to the "status" of Yahoo.

But it seems like this whole process comes because "boringness" makes operators no money even when serves end-users purposes perfectly. Look at craiglist - the most boring, most successful-at-fulfilling-a-need and the least-profitable-relative-to-traffic commercial website in the world.

Flickr and MySpace come to mind, too.

Generally, don't let a user pollute other users' posts/streams/walls with ugly invitations, apps, or animated glitter.

Many people have no taste or lack the ability to judiciously use such features. If you let them, your site will quickly become garbage.

Let's put some numbers around this interesting statement. Are there really a lot of people who find the atmosphere on Twitter much nicer than the atmosphere on Facebook? How about Google Plus? How many people find its atmosphere much nicer than the atmosphere on Facebook? And for the most important numbers, how much revenue is each of those companies gaining from the people who like each company's atmosphere best?

P.S. I like Facebook very well indeed, because my international network of friends is largely all there. I use Facebook much like a social linking service (not too differently from how I use HN), posting links I find interesting to invite comments from friends, and posting comments in threads about links posted by other people. The intellectual tone of the discussions I encounter on Facebook is very high--although that surely mostly has to do with how I met many of my friends. We (all my various friends and I) devote time and effort to cultivating a respectful atmosphere of people expressing frequently wildly varying opinions, as long as everyone is civil and everyone is encouraged to look up facts. That's like being invited to graduate seminars (a real-life experience I have had) on interesting subjects at any hour of the day that is convenient for me. As long as Facebook can monetize enough, somehow, to allow people like me who don't give it money (but arguably do give it content) to meet one another there, Facebook will be part of my life for a long time. After all, my FRIENDS are there.

After edit: regarding the comment elsewhere in this thread about the submitted article,

This is a poorly researched article that takes a few anecdotes

I can't say I necessarily disagree, but note for the record that most blog posts are poorly researched and mostly based on anecdotes. In actual fact, on HN poorly researched blog posts tend to be much more upvoted as new submissions than professionally written research articles. It's a rare case when a general readership of a website (e.g., HN's readership) prefers discussing careful research to discussing a few anecdotes.

Another comment asks,

Are people excited by search?

I was very excited by Google when it first became available. (I discovered Google before it was publicly announced, by noticing what search engines were spidering my personal website back in the 1990s.) Google's results were so plainly superior to those of Excite, Lycos, and even AltaVista (my previous favorite search engine) that I soon told all my friends about Google. Search results that turn up reliable, accurate, readable links are always a pleasure. The way to do better at search than Google does would be to somehow serve up better results more consistently--that would be exciting, if it is possible.

I think they have leant a bit on this front, the subscribe and the enhanced lists are there for those that want them but try to stay as far out of the way as possible for the general crowd who would dislike them being forced in as a key component.

What I look forward to is a proper rollout of credits, I think at the moment Facebook apps appear similar to me to a lot of the free apps on the app store, of questionable quality and loaded with ads. Once there is an easier path for developers to monetise apps (and probably improvements in the process of making an app docs and stable api wise) I think we will see more quality, useful things popping up.