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Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

jeffdechambeau.com

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Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#71

Post by brlewis »

Timothee wrote: post #56
stevecooperorg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December. It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily. This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'

As for not going with a straight chronological list, I think that really the idea behind Timeline is to take all the information that was put in Facebook and present it in something that is more akin to digital scrapbooking. They want you to have something more personal and emotional so that you're more attached to it. Their ad about it is clear about that: Facebook should be the place where you keep track of your li…

Making a photo collection look interesting automatically is actually really straightforward. I think anyone who spends serious time attacking this problem will arrive at a solution.

Use the EXIF timestamp of when each photo was taken. Make a web page for each month, and group photos together by day to make it easy to skim through. Limit the number of photos shown on this page for any given day (put the rest on their own page) and you've automatically got variety. With those two simple organizational steps, viewers of the photo collection are set up for success in quickly finding photos that interest them, assuming there are some.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#72

Post by hack_edu »

iamandrus wrote: post #16

The problem I have with Timeline is the awful way that it organizes posts. The two column format is awkward and it makes it hard to search or even casually read posts as you scroll down, because your eyes are darting between the two columns rather than one. The grouping is pretty crap, too.

As much as I want to like it, I don't even try to read people's profiles anymore.

If Facebook wanted me to pay 100% attention to the Status feed, they've succeeded. And by Status feed, I don't mean whatever that thing on the right frame is. Who reads that anyway?

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#74

Post by smackfu »

tylermenezes wrote: post #41
gonehome wrote: post #2

Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.

I'm pretty sure someone actually just saw Path and thought "that's kind of cool". (And then decided to implement it only on the web and not on the mobile.)

Facebook Mobile has Timeline too, although only one column.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#75

Post by sudoscience »

blhack wrote: post #37

The problem with timeline, for me, is lack of context. Scroll back to the beginning of my life on facebook and you see exchanges between me and my then girlfriend. Scrolling through 5 years worth of status updates gave you context for this (sortof), it was psychologically "far" away. Being able to just click "2006", and easily see that stuff is creepy . This is why I can't stand this timeline nonsense. So...do I dele…

I, unlike others, love Timeline, but I think the product cast too wide a net. Do I want to go back and revisit posts I made in 2006? I sure do, and love to be able to do that easily.

Do I want others to do that? Well, not so much. Timeline would have been a perfect product in my view if it only applied to your own profile.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#76

Post by jdietrich »

gonehome wrote: post #2

Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.

We need to ask a simple question - what are the metrics that Facebook seek to optimise?

I can't imagine a universe in which they aren't placing at least some weight on the standard suite of "engagement" metrics. If that is the case, then they're seeking to increase the amount of time you spend on the site, the number of pages you view, the number of ads you see (and click), the frequency with which you scroll below the cut and so on.

Creating an interface that provides fast, easy access to the most relevant information means that most of your core metrics get worse. Facebook would have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally far-sighted for their interface to do anything but get worse. They would need a corporate culture that is either centralised and vision-led, or utterly indifferent to short-term measures of engagement and profitability. Zuckerberg is a smart man, but he's not a Steve Jobs or a Larry Page.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#77

Post by ispivey »

The biggest benefits of timeline are (1) making it easier to see stuff in the past and (2) calling out the most memorable important events/content while hiding less important stuff. They could have done this in a list format, but using the Timeline makes it much more clear that important things are being called out while some other things are being left hidden.

It's a powerful solution to the problem of browsing all of a user's content over time, which was very difficult in the old profile. And it's a perfectly good reason for Facebook to try Timeline without ascribing ulterior motives.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#78

Post by ryanmolden »

jgw wrote: post #69
ryanmolden wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.” I always chuckle at thoughts like this. If we want to rank on a scale of intellect it isn't clear that simply being a Google/Facebook/ employee puts you in the 'smartest in the world' bucket. There are PLENTY of people that aren't software engineers that are likely much smarter than anyone at any of these companies,…

Quite so. But "s/world/high tech/g" (and maybe "s/smartest/some of the smartest/g") and the broader point still stands, even without the hyperbole: lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.

>and maybe "s/smartest/some of the smartest/g"

Not maybe, definitely. Unless you are trying to make the claim that the set of the smartest people in tech is a proper subset of the employees of Google (or Google employees unioned with Facebook employees). I think lots and lots of very smart people that don't work for Google or Facebook would strongly disagree, and evidence is on their side.

>lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.

Yes, but lots and lots of very smart people are also doing . The statement seems to pre-suppose that there is no or little value in the work they do and they should be working on more 'valuable' problems.

I personally hate advertising, but I don't look down on people that work at Google or Facebook if their job involves increasing click-through rates, nor do I believe having smart people focused on these kind of tasks is 'holding us back' in any meaningful way. To believe so implies that 'smart people' can excel/advance the state of the art for anything they work on, and thus they should focus on more 'important' things. If these smart people were attracted to doing these more important things that may be true, but then they would probably be doing them already. If they are attracted to what they are doing then they should continue, and do it as best they can. Further it ignores the idea that there are side-effects of their work that could be more valuable to the world as a whole (like new discoveries in machine learning, or algorithms, or even human psychology).

The fundamental currency that buys advancement is intelligence, creativity and passion for what you are doing. If you have 2 out of 3 you are unlikely to contribute meaningfully, and simply reassigning everyone at Google to work on say self-driving cars is unlikely to yield reliable, self-driving cars any faster, in fact it would likely cripple the effort.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#79

Post by padrack »

Jimmy wrote: post #8
gonehome wrote: post #2

Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.

But it's not a better and prettier interface. It's just awful. Granted, the only ads that appear on a Timeline page are in a narrow column off to the side (I didn't even know there were any ads until I specifically checked for them after reading this article), so I'm not sure how valid this conspiracy theory is. But it doesn't change the fact that Timeline looks horrible.

Sponsored stories will begin appearing in the Timeline. That was the intent behind removing the straight chronological river (newsfeed), to be able to place ads into your stream in a way that looks more natural.

Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident

#80

Post by latchkey »

I'd never heard of System1/2 before, but it makes a lot of sense. Sites that are similar to the FB timeline, like Pinterest (which I recently signed up on to try it out), also give me that same sense of having to 'pay attention' more. It becomes more of a novelty instead of something that I'd want to use all the time. I think that is part of the popularity of sites like Craigslist and Hackernews, which present the information in an easily scanned format. They both fall into System 1. I think that as I do UX design for my site, I'll keep this in mind.
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