I'm arguing that the depth of consideration should be inversely proportional to the ease with which one can run a test. Certainly the people at Facebook had som

I'm arguing that the depth of consideration should be inversely proportional to the ease with which one can run a test. Certainly the people at Facebook had some intuition about if this new dynamic would be appealing to people. But the reality is the success of these types of apps are hard to predict based upon your own personal preferences, when you look at the way various apps split along demographic lines. This type of app is trivial for Facebook to build at this point, it's really just a matter of opportunity cost for them, so it seems likely they will continue to try various small tweaks to interaction models in order to find successes in this domain. And like I said, you can criticize the idea that they should be building these types of things in the first place. But people saying that this particular incarnation will never work because they don't "get" it haven't been paying attention the last 5 years in the mobile space, and those who lament the fact that all this talent was put into this app are probably overestimating the effort for a company like Facebook to produce something like this at this point.