I admit it: I’m hooked on Facebook.
Canadians will attest that over the past month, Facebook has swept the interwebs like a plague. A very happy plague, though.. a pestilence carried on the back of aesthetically pleasing, UI responsive web standards design, through a complex series of tubes.
It’s ironic that as a web developer, the number of sites that I actually use every day is quite small. I love Flickr, I read Pitchfork, I monitor my Livejournal friends page. Everything else is more incidental, and I’m happy to receive it as an RSS feed. A site has to be so capital-a Awesome to make it into my daily habit that it’s… well, it’s obscenely rare.
I hate MySpace. It offends me. I keep a profile there, because you can’t be a web developer that claims to be a social networking expert and not have one. However, I don’t enjoy going there, and my disgust with it absolutely colours my expectations for all other “social” sites. Until now, that is.
Facebook raises the bar for what a social network should be so high that all existing current breed sites should be embarassed. Specifically, it gets three things right that might not be revolutionary on their own, but in the context of the site’s implementation, it feels perfect:
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“Poke” is probably the first radical communication medium shift since ICQ gained momentum in 1996. Yes, I think that poking your friends is a bigger deal than VoIP, because it’s actually a new type of communication. In our attention starved, always on, all-work culture of speed, the most destructive force in the universe is distraction. There are so many people and so many things going on, that to try and keep on top of everything is a full time job. Poking is a brilliant push against attention theft; it’s simply a way to say “Hi! I’m thinking about you. I don’t have anything important to say, I don’t need to have a conversation, but you’re nice and if I had my way, we’d be having a coffee right now.” Remember how much time you used to spend on the phone before the Internet? Well.. now I remember how much time I used to spend on email and instant messaging.
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People might call it StalkBook, but it’s because you can find people from your past, not because you can find new people to flirt with. That is the fundamental difference between Facebook and MySpace; every user is an island, and you only exist in the context of your relationships to people you actually know. Even if you know someone, all you see is their name, icon, and who they know, until they agree that there is a real-world connection. It means that you get less dudes trolling for sex, no crappy garage bands begging you to listen to their demo, and a contact list that is likely a reasonable estimation of the people you’ve met in real life. It’s not a numbers game anymore.
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Hyper-response Ajax interface. I saved the most important detail until last, because it’s more nerdy! Most sites implement Ajax wrong, and I’m not innocent here; the status quo is that you click on a link or button, and the site is programmed to pop up a spinning status notification while it fetches new content from the server. When the transaction has completed, your interface is restored and the user can continue navigation.
Who decided this!? Just because Ajax itself is asyncronous - you send a request and wait for it to succeed or fail - that’s not how good user interfaces work, ever. Facebook assumes your action will be successful, because 98% of the time it will be, and the price of failure is quite low.. perhaps a status error box. If we can be confident that a transaction will succeed, then why not immediately update the user interface to reflect that they have performed an action, and not interrupt the flow? When I poke someone, Facebook tells me I was successful before their server has even been notified of my action. If it fails - due to connectivity or anything else - so what? I didn’t poke them. Why would I want to wait 1-4 seconds to find out that yes, I did exactly what I said I was going to do.
We don’t confirm bowel movements, we just do them. Doodie. Root word: do. Act first, apologize later.