New Facebook Friends Sidebar Subtly Guides Users to Create Lists

Facebook recently released their redesign of the profile page. The details of the new design can be found here. To me, the most interesting piece of the redesign is the tweaked display of your friends, which amounts to little more than a bait to get users to indicate the strength of their relationships through lists (which Facebook has been trying to get users to do for some time, to no avail). Let me explain.

The old Facebook design displayed a list of a few friends that truly appeared to be random. I never saw a high density of friends that I was particularly close to. However, a user could click on the pencil icon in the upper right corner to control exactly who appeared in this section and how many friends were displayed (see below).

The new Friends Display is quite different. The display now pops more than it used to. This is in part because the left sidebar is more streamlined, there is more white space around the displayed friends, and their full names and networks are shown. It also isn’t constrained by a blue header, and is no longer underneath basic information like birthday and current city.

What’s fascinating is who Facebook has chosen to display. Like the old design, each time I reload the page, I have a different set of friends displayed in the space. Right? Well, almost.

What initially caught my attention was the high density of friends displayed that really were my closest friends (my sister, girlfriend, college roommate, and high school best friends, to be exact). It seems that as I reload the page, it persistently shows me (or any of my friends who view my profile page) about 4-5 friends that I am actually very close with along with 4-5 friends whom I haven’t communicated with in years, if I really ever knew them at all. The latter group is made up of people who I never see in my newsfeed, have never communicated with on Facebook and with whom I have few mutual friends. I can assume with fairly high confidence that Facebook knows I have a low strength of relationship with these people. 

Which brings me to my hypothesis: in the UI for this new “friends” sidebar, Facebook intentionally is sprinkling in among people you do care about, people who you don’t care about. In essence, they are taking your top 5 strongest relationships and putting them next to your 5 weakest connections. 

When I continually see people that are my real-life best friends in this space, I am pushed to believe that this is the where people I am closest to should appear. It is reinforced by the fact that the person you are in a relationship with has a dedicated space in this sidebar, as does your siblings. However, when I see a mixture of people I am very close to positioned next to people I hardly know, the juxtaposition triggers a subtle voice in my head tells me something isn’t right - and I feel a nudge to correct the mistake. And this is exactly what Facebook is trying to get the users to do, click that little pencil icon in the upper right hand corner to edit this section.

Users would be forgiven to believe that clicking the icon will allow them to edit who is displayed here. This would be too easy, right? I’d just make a few quick adjustments, remove friends I don’t care about, add friends that I do, and be done with it.

Alas, this is not the case. There is no way to alter the people that are displayed in this space. Yes, the same icon does a different thing in the new version than in the old. But wait, there is a consolation prize! When I click this icon, I am prompted to make new lists! Classic bait-and-switch.

So how am I to get rid of the visual prominence given to these “hardly-knows” on my profile? Well, I can create new lists that trump the auto-generated list “friends.” The more I make, the further down on my page these people go. And that is exactly what I am driven to do - create relationship lists.

So part of what this redesign is about is baiting users to create priority lists. From this, they can solve a number of problems, including determining the context in which certain people are important to you and others are not, as well as solving the whole “I have 800 Facebook friends, but I dont care about 700 of them” problem. 

It seems in this design Facebook has employed the best tactic known to compel a user to action: display something publicly about a user that is incorrect (or in this case, slightly off, but enough to be unsettling). I see 5 people I barely know position next to my 5 best friends in my featured friends list, and I want to do something about it. It is quite clear that Facebook knows who my top friends are, but they choose not to display it to me all at once! Likewise, they have a sense for whom I am least connected to, and they do choose to display these people. 

This also highlights the idea that the best way to get a user to do something is to make it prominent in the UI. Though not a particularly novel idea, it is one that many web services seem to forget. If featured relationships are prominent, I’ll update them. If my job, current location and hometown are prominent, I’ll keep those up to date. Heck, I don’t know of anyone who initially indicated on Facebook the languages they speak, but I’d bet a large portion will now.

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Zuckerberg’s “Social is Not a Layer” Comments Reveal Limits of Facebook Integration Strategy

In an interview with TechCrunch, Mark Zuckerberg commented that most companies don’t truly understand social. He said:

“Even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’’, I still think a lot of them are only thinking about it on a surface layer,” Zuckerberg says. “It’s like ‘OK, I have my product, maybe I’ll add two or three social features and we’ll check that box’,” he continues. “That’s not what social is.“

“You have to design it in from the ground up,” [Zynga and Quora have] designed their whole product around the idea that your friends will be here with you,” he says.

While I agree with this idea, these comments seem a bit hypocritical considering that a large part of Facebook’s strategy for extending its reach on the web has been through Social Plugins and Instant Personalization, an approach that I’d argue is merely adding a social layer to third party sites.

To date Yelp, Pandora, RottenTomatoes, Docs.com and Scribd have implemented Instant Personalization through Facebook. This means that a user need not explicitly authorize each of these sites to use Facebook data. They need only be logged into Facebook while they are using the other site. For example, when I visit RottenTomatoes while I am also logged into Facebook, I immediately see “Movies my Friends Like,” “Movies Recommended For Me” and my Friend’s Activity on the site, based on information gleaned from my Facebook data. [1] In the past, I had to explicitly authorize the Facebook integration to view my social graph in the context of the third party website. Now the integration is automatic.

Neat as these features are, they still don’t embed “social” into the core of the experience. Yes, they give me information based on some social relationships, but they do not turn my visit into a social experience. I can’t comment around specific movies with my friends, message my friends, see where my movie tastes overlap with my friends, invite my friends to see a movie with me, interact in any way with my friends. The features that Facebook tout so highly only add a social veneer to an otherwise non-social product. These sites are adding window-dressing in order to “check a box” rather than to enable a social experience.

Although Zuckerberg’s comments were perhaps a jab at Google’s planned product roll-out of Google Me later this year, he was actually making the case against the value of his company’s own product, at least in its current form, as a valuable extension to other sites.

I think the fastest path to creating a scalable way for third-parties to incorporate genuine social elements into their sites would be to make web apps that integrate into the site’s core and enable users to take action with friends as part of that experience. One of the best ways I can think to do this is through “data threesomes“ that allow flexibility in how social is integrated into a third-party site.

As Steve Cheney writes, “there is incredible power in blending silo’d data across web services.” For example, lets say in the future a group-buying site begins to incorporate into their API several discounts within a particular vertical, let’s say movies. A movie-ticket vendor like Fandango could blend the Facebook Social Graph with the API of this group-buying site to show users which of their friends haven’t seen a given movie and might like it, and offer them a discount if they buy the ticket with three or more of their friends. This would create a real social experience. This application would not simply show users their friend’s data, but allow them to interact with their friends around third party content. It would be more than a cosmetic layer, but rather a function deeply integrated into the experience and the intrinsic value that Fandango offers.

Genuinely interactive apps would create a more flexible and constructive use of Facebook on a third party site. It would bring more value than the current method of adding a few buttons here or showing a few friends there - a method that Facebook as a company is publicly praising, but one which, it would appear, Zuckerberg personally loathes.

Notes

[1] Interestingly, “Movies Recommended for Me” is blank for me because I have never “liked” any movies. It would appear at this point Facebook is unable, or has not yet released the ability, to extrapolate across categories.