Resistance to change, the Facebook story
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With popularity comes responsabilities. With user engagement comes ownership. With ownership comes resistance to change. Facebook is a perfect example of this. Twice their design changed over the last year and twice it created an uproar. Petitions went up, groups were created and the Facebook team had to defend the changes. |
But, if your business needs to evolve, what do you do?
The homepage needed to become more communication-focused to compete against subsitute products like Twitter or Friendfeed. Facebook depends on advertising money, if their users are no longer logging in to update their status, user engagment declines.
You can assume that some users will always dislike your changes. Obviously, some will be more vocal than others but, you can’t please everyone. With such varied demographics, there’s probably as many ways to use Facebook as there are Facebook users (a lot).
YouTube’s been testing new designs on some traffic segments for the last few years yet the main site barely changed. New designs probably did not outperform the current layout. You have to be able to live with alienating some users if your business depends on it. This wasn’t the case.
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This comment was originally posted on Twitter
I hope Facebook designers could read this: the shade of blue that they use is so bland it absolutely looks uninteresting. I get drowsy whenever I’m visiting my Facebook page these days. Thanks for letting me share my thoughts.
Well, it is true that they are not listening to their visitors, so it will be interesting to see if they will hit by boomerang by not doing so. I hardly thing, as they have the monopoly in socializing.
Indeed, they’re in a good position but struggling to stay in place. They’re trying to avoid becoming MySpace but eventually, another social network will take their place.
Just like the words that Spider Man uttered “Of great power comes great responsibilities”. Facebook should understand what people need. MySpace, Friendster and YouTube understood what people needed and wanted that is why they made a good impression.
Facebook should do the same, as they grow they should know how to adopt to survive. They are not the first and most popular in their field. So if people will not be satisfied people will have a lot of choices. If Facebook have the chance to read this, I would say “In every success is a big failure.” They might be successful today but the question is until when?
Thanks Ryan, very good point regarding current success not guaranteeing future one. We’ll see how their platform evolves but it’s not looking good.
They’re not profitable and have to play catch-up with Twitter. Their value is bound to go down.