mini-feed: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Facebook so far has two influential innovations in social apps: mini-feed and open social platform. The mini-feed is a passive messaging system that constructs a social sensory mechanism. This feature is so successful in creating viral effect that it becomes a widely copied feature as well.

The good: the sweet-spot of mini-feed is the social messaging to enhance users' social sensory capability. It makes a lot of sense to be notified that "Nikki and Alan are now friends" and "John was challenged to a movie quiz!". (Beacon and privacy are a separate issue)

The bad: turning the mini-feed into a personal activity log. It happens on some copycats when the copiers missed the point that social messaging is about what happened on other people who are relevant to you. It's not about "I installed this stupid facebook app on Tuesday 9:34pm and found it's actually really fun". What you care about is to share this app with friends, not yourself.

The ugly: making mini-feed overloaded to the users. The feed is bulky and no longer "mini". The worst scenario is it gets quickly spammed and becomes useless. Facebook started to suffer this problem when the user couldn't digest huge amount of social messages mixed with lots of non-sense ads. The obvious simple solution is to limit the categories of emitted social messages and prioritize them. The ultimate solution is to create intelligent agents that will help the user to process and filter the surrounding social messages.

What is the social app?

The social app is the media.

Social apps are often perceived as tools. However, it is the social usage of such tools that ultimately delivers the social experiences, and all social experiences must be interpreted in corresponding cultures. In McLuhan's media theory, the bridge between tools and cultures is the media. Therefore, the social app actively used in social context ultimately is the media. This media centric social computing model is depicted below:

As a fan of digital photography, I process RAW photos with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The two tools are capable of delivering best possible personal experience for me. However, these Adobe tools are not social apps as there is no social experience involved in my usage. To share my personal experience with others, I post some processed photos onto Flickr. Flickr as a social app is the media for social interactions. If nobody visits my Flickr page, namely, no social usage, Flickr would be merely my personal photo storage media and won’t be anything better than my USB hard drive.

My Flickr social experience is interpreted with the culture coined by the digital photographer community at Flickr. One social norm any careful user can figure out is the photo “dressing code”. To get respect by pro eyes, usually photos need to “dress up” by post-processing. “Naked” unprocessed photos are considered non-professional and novice. Also in Flickr culture, the social value system is carried by the host sub-cultures of the peers. Photographers participated at the same group (e.g. 50mm lens, surrealism) would be more easily appreciate each other’s work and behavior.

The media is the bridge connecting cultures and tools. The active social app, in the form of media, is able to change our cultures gradually. Flickr changed the culture in photographer community. The social value system for judging a photographer is no longer impacted by the person’s profession and professional credential. Nobody cares if you are a professional photographer for living and how many awards you've received in photography contests. At Flickr, only your works speak.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan

When usability is useless

A common mistake in social apps is to design usability with a common conventional objective - efficiency for task fulfillment. Indeed, efficiency is the central theme of the mainstream productivity tools (e.g. word processor, spreadsheet, google search, nextag price comparison, etc.). However, usability merely for efficient user experience is useless in the context of delivering rich social experience because now we live in the web.

Facebook in early days was an CRM (collegemate relationship management) tool. In the sense of usability, the user experience was comparable to enterprise CRM (customer relationship management). The site was designed for efficient task fulfillment in profile management, friend management including a workflow for add-friend request and approval, and an inter-friend messaging system. The social experience, unfortunately, was relatively poor comparing to rival myspace until facebook embraced many third-party mini-apps. A significant number of popular facebook apps are dedicated to delivering social experience (e.g. X me, food fighting, SuperPoke, etc.). These very sociable time wasters have nothing to do with efficiency but actually destroy the productivity in user experience, making the usability for efficiency and productivity totally useless.

SuperPoke at my facebook profile page.

Conventional usability might be inadequate in describing social experience for social apps. In addition, we need to emphasize sociability aspect and create a more human web environment to live in.