Facebook, stay connected.
Right now, Facebook is like a fridge.
My 14 year old sister and I were talking about Facebook when I was changing my dad’s profile picture on the site with awkward photos from his photo library (yes I know his password). When my sister started using Facebook when she was 12 years old, she simply thought it was fun. She had no idea how brilliant it was to be able to sign in and be connected with people from all over the world, in just a matter of a split second. While talking on why she created it, and more importantly, why she quit using it, she told me that the site became boring really quickly and there wasn’t any relevant information.
My sister is really smart, great attitude, great grades and overall a bright person. You might have guessed, all she sees is her own posts because she didn’t even managed to find her newsfeed, the information just isn’t presented in a way that people, especially teens find relevant. The current experience Facebook has isn’t accomplishing the company’s goal, which is connecting every person in the world.
If people are leaving the social network that is all about connecting the world, the new relationships won’t be discovered, the links will start to miss, which will detrimentally affect the Facebook philosophy of connecting the entire globe. Therefore, a company as Facebook should do the best they can to make sure no one is ever leaving the network. I guess you could say it would have the ripple effect. The ripple effect is involved everywhere in Facebook; such as liking, commenting and sharing. That’s what makes it a social network. As soon as the ripple effect starts to turn backwards, the opposite (negative) effect will occur.
As I’m using Facebook every single day, not to scroll endless hours through my newsfeed but because of all the extra added features that make Facebook as clumsy as it is now. Because I’m a geek and *know* how to use it. Those features make Facebook even more connected and powerful than it is with just a newsfeed, but they need to be presented in the right way. They might need to change the interface, but not by rolling it out slowly and changing it every day. Make a great new interface that fits the people’s need and extend their thoughts on what they expected to need and ship it.
A fact is, that people get bored. Over time, most the people (part of Facebook’s target group) will get bored. They will get bored using Facebook too if it doesn’t offer anything else than status updates, videos & images. If Facebook is able to build a platform for every single person where they feel enriched of content and information when they visited Facebook, instead of feeling even more bored.
The best way to illustrate Facebook for most of the people is by saying this:
“Facebook is like a fridge. When you’re bored you keep opening and closing it every few minutes to see if there’s anything good in it. There isn’t anything new or exciting though.”
To be honest, it’s a bummer that so many people are leaving Facebook just because of the website that got cluttered because of all the brilliant features that are added instead. Like groups, events & pages. Of course, people are using it, but do they really see the relevance of for example groups? Do they really understand the relevance that they would feel like creating their own group?
If Facebook would ‘just’ find a way to make the website not as cluttered as it is right now and make it easy for people to see what kind of features fit their lives. I’m a 100% sure, that a lot of people (especially teenagers) will connect and stay at Facebook, which is what makes it a powerful tool for the world to stay connected.
