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Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
- fossuser 15y agoSeems 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.
- Jimmy 15y agoBut 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.
- noodle 15y agoI think its interesting how mixed the response is. I'm rather indifferent on timeline, but I've talked to designer/UI/UX people who both love it and hate it, for various reasons. Apparently different people like different things.
- randomdata 15y agoIt is worth noting that every change Facebook has ever made has been deemed awful by a significant number of people. I'm not certain Facebook, or anyone for that matter, could make an update that satisfies everyone.
- alabut 15y agoYou're absolutely right and it's called Baby Duck Syndrome, which you can learn about after the blackout here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_duck_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_duck_syndrome
- fossuser 15y agoIt's important to keep in mind the scale of Facebook's user base. At nearly 900,000,000 users upsetting 1% of the users with a change creates 9,000,000 angry people.
- thejteam 15y agoMy thought when I first saw it: This is what a Fischer Price "My first Website" would look like.
- padrack 15y agoSponsored 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.
- fossuser 15y agoI think how it looks is subjective. I like the new look of it and how it's easy to see older content where before it was nearly impossible. I also think the idea of having these kind of communication records will be interesting later on when a younger generation can look back on someone's life experiences. Today we have very few of these kinds of records (outside of maybe some photos and letters) unless your family was very diligent about its history.
- stevecooperorg 15y agoThe 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?'
- AznHisoka 15y agoPerhaps they're running out of ways to innovate and worthwhile things to do? Facebook, in its core is a very simple product. Most of the work I imagine is in making sure the servers don't crash. Sure everyone and their mom uses it, and it sounds sexy to work there, but actual work you do? Doesn't sound that complicated, cutting-edge or innovative. It's not like they're doing genetic engineering, or self driving cars.
- res0nat0r 15y agoI'm sure there will always be interesting engineering problems somewhere to work with when you have a website with 600 million users.
- slig 15y agoFiguring out how to use the fuckloads of data that they get either explicitly or via their widgets to sell more ads. Seems rather complicated.
- Timothee 15y agoAs 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 life and expose it (a certain way) to and share it with your friends. For that, you want to highlight a specific picture or event, but still have little anecdotes sprinkled here and there. They want you to go through the Timeline like you'd go through a photo album where you'd have a mix of the big events (graduation, marriage, births, etc.) with the little things, so that you can hear "oh, remember that one? When we went to Disneyland and you fell in the pool…", "you were so mad at him that day! Look at what you wrote on your wall…", etc. Not having just a list makes it a bit more interesting to peruse. It's like going through a shoebox of photos and souvenirs, spread them out and you see some things, not others… I'm not saying they've nailed it, but it's a first version of it and it's an interesting experiment. It's hard to make an interesting photo album by hand, it's even harder to make something semi-automated. As as side-note: The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December. I find that interesting since I personally rarely see people's profiles or timelines.
- tylermenezes 15y agoI'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.)
- k-mcgrady 15y agoPath came after Timeline.
- Me1000 15y agoPath existed at least a year before timeline.
- k-mcgrady 15y agoSorry, I meant Path 2 which more closely resembles Timeline. I don't think there is much similarity between Path 1 and Timeline.
- tylermenezes 15y agoPath being popular ("popular"?) came after timeline. Path existed a long time before timeline.
- smackfu 15y agoFacebook Mobile has Timeline too, although only one column.
- DevX101 15y agoIt's hard to say what facebook's intentions here without inside knowledge, but I wouldn't discount it. The founder of modern propaganda and advertising, Edward Bernays, performed many extremely subtle experiments that had dramatic shifts in how Americans behave to this day. (By the way, Bernays coined the phrase 'public relations' to replace 'propaganda' after it had been co-opted by the Nazis). He got women to smoke by calling them 'freedom torches' and orchestrating high society women to light cigarettes in a demonstration for suffrage. He facilitated the modern retail industry by shifting American behavior from a 'need-based' consumer to a 'want-based' consumer. There are billions of dollars being spent to increase the effectiveness of advertising and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the world's biggest advertiser used subtle tactics to achieve this aim.
- adamio 15y agoGoogle spends dollars to increase the relevance of advertising. Relevance is a means to effectiveness. Some of Google's most effective ads are relevant, text only, in the margins of pages. Propaganda and changing behaviors is a leap away from ad placement and layout online.
- gabaix 15y agoFacebook released Timeline so people want to publicize more of their life. More data = more advertising. I think business people use simple equations to justify their decisions.
- mcphilip 15y agoThe Century of The Self, a 4 part documentary by Adam Curtis, covers exactly what you just mentioned. Fascinating stuff, and available in its entirety on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM
- JonnieCache 15y agoSurely the entire of facebook constitutes one big "secret psychological advertising conspiracy." That sounds like a perfect description to me, if you discount the alarmist, x-files connotations of "conspiracy." Neuromarketing is a pretty standard practice now, I don't think any of this is controversial.
- dkarl 15y agoI agree. I can't see how anyone would imagine that Facebook aren't working hard at their job, which is, in fact, delivering ads and making people click on them. Or that all that investment is spent paying smart people to have fun and sow the seeds of happiness worldwide, and every once in a while pay a little attention to the business model as an afterthought. I would really, really appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we ever applied the term "conspiracy theory" to the common-sense assumption that a for-profit company's business decisions are motivated by (gasp, shock) profit.
- fossuser 15y agoBy making your users your priority you create an environment where they want to be and will continue to use your platform. Putting your users first allows you to continue to profit through means like advertisements. If you put your users second to profits you'll quickly alienate them. I tend to think consumer facing companies like Facebook and Google really do think of their users first, but perhaps I'm just naive.
- gnaritas 15y agoFacebooks customers are the advertisers, users are just bait. If they're putting anyone first, it's the advertisers.
- dkarl 15y agoI think you're contradicting yourself by saying their concern for users derives from profit and then saying they put their users "first." If acquiring and keeping users is a means to an end, namely advertising revenue, then users are secondary to advertising revenue. Is there some other dynamic in the corporation (other than profit) that drives Facebook and Google to value users? If the answer is human good will, then I can believe it has some influence in some cases, but not that it ever overrides profit. Good will can be influential where there is a sincere belief that it is the best guide to long-term profit, and I think Google's founders were fairly successful in instilling that belief in their corporate culture, but in a mass consumer business that belief will be worn down through the process of making many small decisions where the two priorities conflict.
- jdietrich 15y agoWe 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.
- fossuser 15y agoThis reminds of a story mentioned in Steven Levy's "In The Plex". Larry and Sergey are showing off their page rank algorithm to a search engine company early on showing how much better and faster it is. The person they're showing it to is upset at how fast it is saying, "it's too good". He wanted the search to be slow so that users would be stuck on the search engine page longer and view more ads. Larry and Sergey left thinking the guy was an idiot. I don't think it takes that much intuition to realize that treating your users well and building something for them will be better in the long run.
- dustingetz 15y agobig companies are good at executing established business models, and bad at discovering new ones. small companies, the opposite. it could never be any other way.
- teja1990 15y agoI don't about the conspiracy behind timeline , but timeline just made it difficult for em to read through my posts , some stay on left some on left. It would be good , if they keep whole month's content on 1side and next on other . It helps me viewing .
- quattrofan 15y agoBut its not better and its not prettier, its a mess and one I generally completely avoid. I used to occasionally click on peoples profiles especially if I was considering connecting, now its such an assault on the senses I don't bother. My FB useage as a result is probably declining...
- jff 15y agoOr the Facebook Timeline is their New Coke--they can roll it out, then in a few months roll back to something similar, but not exactly the same as, the old layout.
- SomeOtherGuy 15y agoIf it is their New Coke, then what you mean is they can roll it back to something exactly the same, and then have conspiracy nuts repeat nonsense claims that it is different now. New Coke was not a way to distract people while they changed the recipe of classic, classic didn't change.
- eekfuh 15y agoClassic did change. It went from having cane sugar before to having high fructose corn syrup afterwards.
- jff 15y agoWell, according to Snopes this is a myth; bottlers had been allowed to use HFCS in original Coke prior to the introduction of New Coke. Here's what Wikipedia has to say: The new product continued to be sold and retained the name Coca-Cola (until 1992, when it was officially renamed Coca-Cola II), so the old product was named Coca-Cola Classic, also called Coke Classic, later just Coke and for a short period of time it was referred to by the public as Old Coke. Many who tasted the reintroduced formula were not convinced that the first batches really were the same formula that had supposedly been retired that spring. This is partially true because Coca-Cola Classic differed from the original formula, as all bottlers who hadn't already done so were using high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar to sweeten the drink
- jgw 15y agoNot sure about that. What Coca Cola actually ships from Atlanta is the syrup, unsweetened. The bottlers add water and sugar to this, and AFAIK [1], it is up to their discretion what type of sugar to use. This is one of the reasons that Coke tastes different in different places - a can of Coke in Montreal is very different from one in Toronto. I'd have fact-checked this, but for some reason, Wikipedia is down... :) [1] Perhaps this is no longer the case, but it certainly was in 1989, when I "interned" at a Coke bottling facility in Harare, Zimbabwe for a week
- suking 15y agoI was just talking to a friend about timeline and how hard it is to navigate. I can't even go on friends pages that use it - it's just too hard to get used to, especially when almost everyone else uses the regular interface.
- simondlr 15y agoWhile an interesting theory (I should read the book), how are you certain that system 2 comes online when viewing the timeline?
- jeffdechambeau 15y agoCan't be certain, but I know that from a subjective perspective my brain feels the same way browsing timeline as it does when I'm doing math or reasoning intently. The experience of cognitive strain is present in both cases. One example in the book is that even hard to read fonts can cause cognitive strain and make you judge the content of the text differently. I see that as being largely analogous.
- Lewisham 15y agoFrom my reading of the book (and the exerpt you have mentioned here), I'd agree that System 2 is in play when looking at the Timeline; it does create some cognitive load. However, I can't remember anything backing your assertion that System 2 is more susceptible to advertising. In fact, my reading is the opposite: System 1 cannot help but read words or look at images, and it is easily swayed by various advertising techniques. It would be System 2 that processes what's happening, realizes you are trying to be sold something that you probably don't want/need, then rejects it. Isn't it a lack of engagement of System 2 that leads people to instinctively click ads or follow spam links?
- zerostar07 15y agoHaving followed the changes in their platform for years that doesn't seem to be the case. It s probably somebody new wanting to try some new idea. Zynga does have an optimization engine in place, Facebook does trial and error too much: profile boxes, tabs, no boxes, top stories etc, it's just pointless variations of a newsfeed.
- citricsquid 15y agoI like the new Timeline feature but the inability for me to switch to some sort of "old" view when I just want to see a perfect list of updates without any fancy grouping an annoyance. For casual use the Timeline is good but it leaves a lot to be desired when I want to see everything.
- natesm 15y agoBuy an iPhone. Joking. But the Timeline view in the iOS app places all items in a single column. That said, Facebook has basically become a place where I sync my tweets and other services like Instagram so that people that I know who don't use Twitter yet can see them.
- randomdata 15y agoThe iPhone app is just a thin wrapper around http://m.facebook.com/ http://m.facebook.com/, so any browser will do.
- bobbles 15y agoI love the timeline layout.. id rather scroll easily through stuff from a couple of years ago and get a good overview of what I was doing than go through photo galleries I have on my PC with no context or further information.
- jraines 15y agoIt has its rough edges, but I have to say that scrolling down the Timeline is a more personal and emotional experience than can be found anywhere else.
- thomasgerbe 15y agoI have to disagree. Going through a photo gallery is far more emotional and personal than browsing a two column grid.
- pxlpshr 15y agoYour argument doesn't compute. You're comparing content (photo gallery) with a design structure. The "two column" grid includes photos, locations, new friends, comments, etc.
- thomasgerbe 15y agoPerhaps I should've been more specific. His argument was that scrolling down timeline is one of the most emotional experiences. Scrolling through a haphazard column system of photos of mishmash isn't that emotional to me. Going one by one through a persons Facebook album is more emotional to me because of the focus (one photo) and organization (I know which album I picked).
- swalsh 15y agoPhotos are a pretty emotional experience, true. However I think there's a major difference. Typically photos on my facebook represent moments, short memories in time... mostly happy. Looking at a photo makes me remember the context of the photo. However a status update is different. They're more frequent, they're less significant. They give context around the less important things. For example, I remember the first time I looked at my timeline there was a status update that said something along the lines of "Oh man new doughnut at the Dunkin!" I wrote it a few years ago, and it was Completely pointless, and meaningless.. but then I remembered it, because later that day my mom was hit by a car. The entire events of that day flashed in my mind. Frankly that was pretty emotional for me.
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- joebadmo 15y agoI think the formulation that "the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads" is awfully reductive. Reading Steven Levy's In the Plex really gave me a sense of what the people at Google are actually about, and it's not just making money. There's a somewhat naive idealism at work that you can judge however you want, but you should acknowledge its existence. While I tend to give the people at Facebook less credit, I do think there's a similar idealism at the core of the project. But I think they're fundamentally undermining human connection in many subtle ways that I've written about on my blog. Specifically, and more to the point, I think Timeline undermines the human intimacy of private sharing for the benefit of public performance. http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and-performance-on-facebook http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and-perf...
- adamio 15y agoIsn't this the basis of "disruption"? Change the format and you cause people to look more closely at something. Users will get used to timeline and they'll have to change again. Also I'm skeptical of the statement "facebook will be changing the way our brains process advertising".
- iamandrus 15y agoThe 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.
- hack_edu 15y agoAs 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?
- steve8918 15y agoI agree, they've pretty much broken every single UI convention by having information chronologically separated in between columns. As a society, we're used to following down a column because of the breaks, like a newspaper. For some stupid reason, Facebook has broken this convention and made posts go back and forth between the column break which is idiotic. What I despise is the lack of privacy, because if I tag a photo with a friend's name, all their friends can see it, regardless of my privacy settings which forces me to no longer tag my friends. I basically have stopped using Facebook except for reading up on the newsfeed.
- notthemessiah 15y agoI made a diagram expressing this exact point a few days ago: http://imgur.com/xynCW http://imgur.com/xynCW feel free to reuse/remix
- chefsurfing 15y agoJeff, if I read you correctly, you think turning on brain system 1 and brain system 2 to insert advertising constitutes a grey or dark pattern [1]? [1] http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Home http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Home
- jeffdechambeau 15y agoVery interesting. I know what I'll be doing with my afternoon. I lacked this language, but yes I think that's a fair reading of my position. There's a broader argument that facebook really is providing a valuable service to us by making us aware of products and services that really will make our lives better. I'm unmoved by that claim, as I suspect most of us are.
- jgw 15y ago"the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.” Does anyone know what quote he's alluding to here? I recall skimming an article on it some time ago, but I can't actually find the original. I've been thinking about this trend - and, quite frankly, being depressed by it - a lot recently.
- jeffdechambeau 15y agoI went looking for it too but came up empty handed. I know it was said/written somewhere. And yeah, it is depressing. And I spend my time thinking about what they're doing... not sure if that is better or worse.
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- joebadmo 15y agoIt was Jeff Hammerbacher talking to Business Week after leaving Facebook. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
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- bockris 15y agoThis is where I first saw it. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
- jgw 15y agoThat's the one I was thinking of! Thanks very much.
- casca 15y agoYou are not the target audience. Yes, if you're reading this, you are not the audience that Facebook is building for. The Timeline is there after being extensively tested and stays there are long as the results (Facebook definition) are better than the alternative. In case you missed it, to be clear - you are not the target audience.
- blhack 15y agoThe 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 delete all of this stuff? I don't have a problem with these things being a part of my history, I just don't like them being presented in such a readily-available way...
- pietro 15y agoI have similar feelings about this. I'm deleting everything that isn't part of my current life, and I've all but stopped posting. It's a shame, really.
- henrikschroder 15y agoThis is also my main problem with it. The idea is nice to have some sort of diary where you log important events in your life so that you can scroll back in someone's history and see when important things happened. But sometime before Timeline, Facebook made a change so that each post has an individual visibility to give users more control or whatever, and when I switched over to Timeline, all my old posts that weren't private automatically appeared on my timeline, and I can't easily change the visibility of all those old posts, that are now much more easily accessible. I want the newer posts on my Timeline to be visible, so others can see the latest crap I shared with my friends, but I want the older posts to fade into obscurity, unless I actively bring them back again.
- runn1ng 15y agoYou can change the visibility of all the past posts easily; select " Limit the Audience for Past Posts" in Privacy Settings.
- untog 15y agoLast time I checked that only allowed you to set it to 'friends', as opposed to 'public'. There was no option to set it to specific groups of friends.
- fauldsh 15y agoI can't be the only person who has never used timelines? I assumed other people used facebook like me: To read what friends had posted, maybe occasionally post myself and respond to messages/events, nothing more. The only timeline I have seen was one in which my friend put a picture of baby Jesus as his birth picture...
- colanderman 15y agoAlong these same lines, one could say that Timeline's addition of the personalized banner image with the user's name across it makes users look more like brands, possibly in an attempt to desensitize Facebook users to the difference between brands and actual people.
- engtech 15y agoIf anyone else had trouble reading the site because of font rendering in Firefox (what is up with those r's, D's and S's!?), I found readability made it digestible. http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets
- nuttendorfer 15y agoStopped using Readability and switched to Readable when their bookmarks started doing funky stuff involving their servers.
- jeffdechambeau 15y agoThat's google webfonts. Looks great on my mac but not so great on my PC :/
- drenei 15y agoKahneman and his research is fascinating. Vanity Fair had an short article that serves as a goodish introduction to him that is worth a quick read. (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/michael-l...)
- dreamdu5t 15y agoEffective? I doubt it. I haven't clicked a single ad or promotional item in FB, after using it for years. I click on Google ads at least a couple times a month, because they tend to be relevant to what I'm looking for at the moment.
- jeffdechambeau 15y agoWhoops, ran out of bandwidth. Called my host and should be back online in a second.
- jgh 15y agoThat font is too awful to be an accident.
- ispivey 15y agoThe 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.
- latchkey 15y agoI'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.
- dxbydt 15y ago>> "When information is organized in a list, it’s trivially easy to scan it, but with Timeline your eye has to dart around and try to combine the layout into an understanding of what the person’s been up to. It induces cognitive strain" Well, the whole idea is to engage the user. They hang around a lot more when they engage. If you give somebody a list they will trivially take the head the second time onwards ( they will pop the stack, for any imperative folks out there ). That's because the very first time, you actually traverse the list. From then on, the head tells you if the list has mutated. So your brain will save you the cognitive load by simply taking the head of the list and then saying to you, look, there is no need to engage further since there hasn't been any destructive update since the last time you looked. So you will log off. To prevent disengagement, all creative media ( magazines, newspapers, movies, comics, TV etc. ) will assault you on multiple fronts. So you don't get a list anymore. So Time magazine will have multiple columns on the same page, with each column corresponding to a different topic. One of those columns will have a picture, another an ad, the third an infographic, the fourth some text, and so on. I took a bunch of semesters of screenplay writing where this stuff is actually taught in some gory detail - how to keep the viewer hooked. Never be linear - the viewer is smart and will simply (and often correctly) guess where the movie is headed. So confuse the viewer by presenting information in a non-linear fashion deliberately, and occasionally throw interesting but unrelated bits of filler/second unit stock footage into the plot. Spice things up. I believe it was the british who came up with the more accurate term "sex it up". That's what facebok is doing. Frankly, it works very well - for the non-programmer types. Lets be clear, your life isn't all that interesting. If I just show you status updates in a list, you will be bored stiff after a point. But if I introduce a tiny element of stochastic displacement in your timeline, you will wonder, hey, where did this come from , when did I do that, etc. That'll keep you engaged, and that translates to a longer duration on the site => more $$
- eggbrain 15y agoI think Facebook timeline differs in a fundamental way from, lets say, newspapers. Newspapers work well with multiple columns because there's no inherent connecting features. Sure a page from the sports section will all have sports related items, but in general all the columns stand by themselves. Facebook timeline is united by time. As in, what I say at the top of my timeline might be directly related to what I said before, and that might be directly related to what i said before that, and so on. So as humans, we want to read objects in the way they were chronologically presented. But on the new timeline, in order to do this, we have to zig zag from left to right, to left again. This isn't engaging the user just as making me do jumping jacks while I read isn't engaging -- yes it is spicing up my reading experience, but that just forces me to relearn something that is harder than what I was doing originally. If the timeline was broken up into pieces, I could deal with that. Wall posts on the left, images and polls on the right, etc. Give my eyes some logical way to focus on only a part of my screen. But the exact middle of the screen on Facebook is a dividing line between left and right that presents almost identical information, and I have to form a structure from that. Taking another example, in movies, it makes sense that the movie makers try to confuse and sex up a movie -- our brains want to be stimulated. But there's a difference between spicing the content of entertainment and spicing up the delivery method that content is offered -- imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoI don't know. I think making money is a sideline to Facebook's real goals. That might not make sense to people with a simplistic view of what corporations are for, but I think it's true nonetheless.
- pixie_ 15y agoI found timeline confusing at first, but then I realized if I focus on the line in the middle then reading posts becomes just as orderly as it was before, with the added benefit of greater information density. It also unclutters the left side of the page which was a column before. And also by turning the background blue it gives better contrast to the news/chat panels on the right. About a third of my friends have switched over now, and old profiles just look old. The large banner was a nice touch as well.
- lukeschlather 15y agoThe first time I saw the timeline, my first thought was "Wow, that's roughly as cluttered as MySpace. We've almost come full circle."
- feralchimp 15y agoRe: "the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads." Maybe the third-smartest. The smartest people in the world probably aren't working hard, period. The second-smartest people are working hard to build shit that sells itself.
- lcusack 15y agoI agree with the headline but I think the real purposes is to drive more people to the news feed instead of browsing profiles. The ads are inserted into the news streams.
- jaylevitt 15y agoAs a layperson, I think Kahneman's work is brilliant and I can't wait to read the book, but do understand that to the actual evil scientists - research psychologists - he is Donald Knuth, not, um, whoever's hot in CS these days. They think his ideas revolutionized the field a few decades ago, and it's great that he finally got his book published, but meanwhile, we've learned a lot and that whole dual-system thing is kinda quaint. So lucky for us, if Facebook were really basing their designs around what is more Poor Richard's Almanac than the Bible, we can build far more compelling experiences than Facebook using actual cutting-edge psychology - and I feel kinda lucky to get paid to do just that.
- aristus 15y agoAny recommendations for books that are less "quaint"?
- jaylevitt 15y agoFrom one of our evil scientists: Why [Everyone Else] Is a Hypocrite -Kurzban How The Mind Works -Pinker The Stuff of Thought -Pinker The Evolution of Human Sexuality -Symons Where Mathematics Comes From -Lakoff & Nunez Passions Within Reason -Frank Culture of Honor -Nisbett & Cohen
- gideon_b 15y agoDan Ariely at MIT has picked up where Kahneman and Tversky left off in terms of behavioural economics. He has written a few books. That said, Kahneman Tversky and Ariely dont deal with scene perception - which is what you would want to look into if you were interested in planting ads. They all started off as vision researchers then shifted into deeper cognitive work. If you want some scene perception look into Dan Simons or Ron Rensink.
- orijing 15y ago> Timeline also makes branded posts (ads) look nearly identical to the actual content we’re on facebook to see, so it follows that they’d be processed similarly. I'm not sure what the author is referring to, but the ads on the side (regrettably IMO) look nothing like the organic content in the main Timeline columns. There isn't enough space to show more organic content on the side as there is next to the Newsfeed. Why does the OP think that the ads are "nearly identical" to organic content?
- domwood 15y agoVery good points there, I can't help but agree. I'm also rather glad I'm one of those anti-Facebook nuts. Where's my foil hat?