http://gawker.com/5180888/facebook-haters-reach-a-million-strong
More than a million Facebook users have voted against Facebook's latest
redesign, which displays an unreadable spew of friends' status updates
on the homepage. A flack says the company is "listening carefully."
Yeah, right!
Facebook redesigns have always attracted an almost ludicrous amount of
controversy, going back to its roots on protest-happy college campuses.
But the outcry this time is different.
Rather than introduce new, unfamiliar features - as Facebook did in 2006
when it first introduced a "News Feed" to the site - in this latest
revision, Facebook has removed or hidden functions users had grown used
to. Useful features, like a calendar of events, are difficult to find.
Many have noted that the new emphasis on status updates makes Facebook
look more like Twitter, a service for broadcasting short text messages
to friends on the Web and on cell phones. Facebook's redesign, however,
managed to copy the worst aspect of Twitter - the unmanageable flood of
incomprehensible trivia - without matching the virtue of its simplicity.
Here's the statement the Facebook flack issued to the BBC:
The new Facebook home page is one step in the continued evolution of
the site, designed to give people more ways to share and filter all
types of content, such as status updates, photos, videos, notes and
more.
We are grateful to have 175 million people worldwide using Facebook
to connect with the people and things they care about most, and we take
their feedback very seriously.
We are listening carefully to what people are saying about the new
home page through a variety of channels - including through a popular
application, built by outside developers on our platform, that allows
users to vote and express their opinion.
Also helpful have been the many comments we're reading on industry
blogs, the Facebook company blog, Mark Zuckerberg's public profile,
Facebook user groups, and through the link on the Facebook new home page
tutorial.
We encourage people to send us constructive, detailed feedback and
are committed to using it to inform how we build and improve the site
for everyone.
Could it be any more obvious that Facebook is not listening to its
customers? It's not a surprise that a flack would lie, but it is a
surprise that one would contradict the boss so blatantly.
Last week, Valleywag revealed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had sent
an email to his staff dismissing the negative feedback and praising
companies which don't listen to their customers as "smart." Listening to
one's customers would lead to Facebook getting "disrupted" - that's
Valleyspeak for "rendered irrelevant" - by an upstart like, say,
Twitter.
So let's be clear: Zuckerberg is telling his PR people to issue
statements that Facebook is attentively listening to user feedback, at
the same time that he is instructing his employees to ignore it.
Facebook is getting disrupted, alright. But it's getting disrupted by
its CEO, whom we hear is ignoring feedback not only from customers but
from his own employees as well.
Instead, he's apparently relying on advisors like former Facebook
executive Matt Cohler, who left the company last year to join Benchmark
Capital, a venture-capital firm which invested in Twitter last month.
Or, who knows - perhaps he's following the advice of a guru he met in
India last May? Or some fellow CEOs he met at Davos?
Whoever Zuckerberg's listening to, he's doing so at Facebook's peril.
Compete.com, a Web-traffic research firm, shows a steady downward trend
in time spent on Facebook since the rollout of the redesign a week ago.
It's early yet, and Compete's statistics are far from conclusive. But
numbers on actual usage are by far the most important feedback users are
giving - the silent majority who are merely clicking away, rather than
posting their gripes. It's telling that nowhere in the company's
statement are actual figures on how the redesign has boosted Facebook's
traffic. If they were anything to brag about, don't you think Facebook
would be sharing them?
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