Tag Archives | Facebook

Facebook Users Are Unhappy With Facebook, Survey Says

Posted by Jared Newman on July 20, 2010 at 1:17 pm

What do Facebook, cable companies, airlines and online tax returns have in common? They’re all about as likely to displease their customers.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index, conducted by the University of Michigan’s business school, this year included social networks for the first time. Wikipedia and YouTube escaped with decent ratings — 77 points and 73 points out of 100, respectively — but Facebook fared poorly with 64 points. That puts the world’s most visited website in the bottom 5 percent of private sector companies in the survey.

Survey participants knocked Facebook’s endless interface tweaks, spam and the technology that controls news feeds, the Wall Street Journal reports. They were only somewhat concerned with privacy even though it was a hot topic a couple months ago, and they also named increased advertising as a source of dissatisfaction.

Interestingly enough, MySpace performed just about as poorly, with 63 points. MySpace has been losing unique monthly visitors for a couple of years, to the point that Facebook gets roughly double the traffic, according to comScore. I’d say that’s a cautionary tale for Facebook, except that MySpace’s rapid decay had as much to with competition from Facebook as general user dissatisfaction. At this point, Facebook’s worst enemy is itself.

There’s some evidence that the rate of Facebook sign-ups is slowing down, but only in the short-term. And an informal survey of Technologizer readers shows enough dissatisfaction that people are willing to pack up and leave the service. But where are those people going to go? Facebook can be replaced to some degree with a mish-mash of other services, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr. Even so, those services won’t be comparable unless you can convince everyone to come with you.

Without an all-encompassing service that provides more satisfaction, Facebook can rest easy while it figures out how to better please its users. As Facebook spokesman Jonny Thaw stated to the Wall Street Journal, “We look forward to the next survey.”

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What Facebook and World of Warcraft Have in Common

Posted by Jared Newman on July 7, 2010 at 5:30 pm

Starting later this month, World of Warcraft developer Blizzard will require its Internet forum members to post under their real life names, using an ID system that is otherwise voluntary for players. The goal is to fight flame wars and banish trolls, using the logic that people wouldn’t be so incendiary if everything they wrote on Internet message boards left a searchable trail.

Within Blizzard’s forums, this is a pretty big deal, even for perfectly civil people. The most reasonable concern I’ve heard is that requiring real names would also force peaceful forumgoers to shed their identities as private massive multiplayer gamers, or at least merge those identities with real life. To paraphrase one forum poster, his World of Warcraft habit could be immediately discovered by any romantic interest or potential employer.

Reading that argument, my mind jumped to Facebook’s privacy approach. For entirely different reasons from Blizzard, Facebook has pushed to make its users’ information more public, notably by defaulting status updates to be shared with the world.

The cynical view is that Facebook seeks more money by opening up user data, but chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also has an atypical worldview, which he shared with David Kirkpatrick in “The Facebook Effect.” To wit:

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Now, I don’t think Blizzard’s new policy has any broader goal than to stop people from spamming and trolling message boards, but it’s hard not to see a bit of Zuckerberg in Blizzard’s actions. Here’s a game developer saying your real life identify and the one you assume as part of World of Warcraft’s Internet community are actually the same. No more hiding one persona from the other. Facebook, it seems, is guided by the same principle.

Whether we’re talking World of Warcraft or Facebook, the merits of this argument will be debated for years to come.

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Facebook Users Like… A Lot

Posted by Ed Oswald on July 7, 2010 at 12:53 pm

The Facebook “Like” has become one of the most recognizable features of the popular social networking site. It’s also used quite a bit — in fact on average we’re hitting that Like button an astounding 65 million times daily, according to statistics compiled by the blog All Facebook. To give you an idea of just how incredible this number is, that means the Like button is used over 750 times every second of every day.

Facebook says that about half of its users log in on every given day, and the site has about 500 million active users according to company statistics. Using those numbers, one out of every four users is liking something somebody’s doing every day.

Up until now, we have not really known the extent of user interaction with Facebook. But these statistics seem to give some color as to why in recent months so much focus has been put on the “Like:” it apparently is Facebook’s most popular feature.

Here at Technologizer, we’ve added the Like button to a majority of posts. There’s been a slow uptick in its use, and we are noticing some traffic as a result. There’s no doubt in my mind that the familiar “thumbs up” will only spread — there is definitely a benefit to getting on your readers news feeds, because content can go viral very easily that way.

It will definitely be interesting in the coming weeks as All Facebook releases more data on user interaction (such as commenting, etc.). What else are we doing when we’re spending — or in some cases wasting — time on the site?

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Privacy Groups Still Not Satisfied With Facebook

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 16, 2010 at 12:54 pm

The issue of privacy has been nagging Facebook for quite awhile now, and it looks like advocacy groups are still not happy with the company’s progress in the space. In an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and eight other groups are asking the site to do more.

“We are glad to see that Facebook has taken steps in the past weeks to address some of its outstanding privacy problems,” the letter begins. Among the recommendations is to give users more control over exactly which applications may access their information, as well as more control over how their information is shared with external sites.

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Facebook's Privacy Makeover: Are You Mollified?

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 26, 2010 at 1:11 pm

For years, Facebook has had a pretty consistent modus operandi: It breaks stuff, catches flack for it, and then–eventually–backpedals or otherwise responds to the criticism. The tradition continues with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new blog post. After a few weeks of intense unhappiness over the company’s recent new features and related changes to privacy policies, it’s redoing its privacy settings in a major way.

Zuckerberg says that the new features will take a few weeks to reach every Facebook user. I don’t see them yet. But here’s a recap of what he says is new:

Rather than having to wade through gazillions of granular settings, it’ll be easy to tell Facebook you want anything you post to be visible to friends only, friends of friends, or everybody. These rules will apply to future Facebook functionality that doesn’t exist yet.
You’ll be able to make your Friends and Pages lists completely private.
It’ll be easier to block apps on Facebook from getting at your information.
It’ll be easier to block external sites such as Pandora which use Facebook’s new “Instant Personalization” from getting at your information. (Currently there’s no single place to go to do this, nor any way to block all sites with one click.)
If users find these changes satisfactory, Facebook intends to avoid major changes to privacy policies “for a long time.”

It’s a given that these tweaks won’t satisfy every unhappy camper. For example, it sounds like Facebook will still share your info via Instant Personalization by default; if this bothers you, you’ve got to proactively tell it to knock it off. Some people, like my colleague Jacqueline Emigh, would be more pleased if Facebook renounced Zuckerberg’s recent proclamation that “the default is social” and made every new form of sharing opt-in rather than opt-out.

Overall, though, the changes look like a significant step in the right direction. If you were rattled by the previous round of changes–as 75 percent of Technologizer readers who took our recent poll said they were–do the ones outlined in Zuck’s new post calm you down?

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