One of the more popular songs that folks sing on American Idol is Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” I’m pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg has that song on repeat lately, as Facebook is on the change wagon. Everyone remembers not that long ago when Facebook redesigned the layout (again). That went over about as well as a teenage girl letting Daddy know the kid down the street knocked her up. Facebookers (and social media folks in general) can be an interesting bunch, and from what I’ve seen, most folks just don’t like change. The old adage, “If it a’int broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t seem so dated any more.
To anyone that uses Facebook on a regular basis, this isn’t anything earth-shattering. Facebook users gripe and moan all the time. Sometimes, they just whine like a baby kitten for no reason. Other times, it’s so powerful it forces change; Beacon wasn’t such a good idea was it? The thing about social media is that it affords you a large audience, so word of mouth is extremely powerful. I don’t agree with everything that Facebook does, but I try to be as objective as possible. Maybe it’s the Libra in me, looking for balance. I get where Facebook wants to go. It’s an intuitive (at least on paper) idea to have your News Feed be about subject matter you wanna read about. Perhaps the coolest upcoming change is Timeline, which essentially is an online “story of your life”. This is just one of the many changes CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about at F8, Facebook’s developers conference. But is Facebook doing too much? Why all of the sudden changes?
Well, with all the hoopla surround Google+ and Twitter’s ubiquitous simplicity, Facebook may be getting a bit nervous. In life, as well as business, it’s always better to be proactive than reactive, and Facebook is trying to stay cutting edge before they fall too far behind. Smart. However, dropping a major design change with a slew of changes not far behind may be overkill for some users. Mark Walsh writes on Online Media Daily, “But the recent pace of upgrades and additions to Facebook in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called the company’s “launching season” may be too much, too quickly for users to easily absorb. Facebook’s effort to adapt similar features on rival social properties like Google+ and Twitter to blunt new competition may also be turning off users.”
According to Pamela Vaughn on her blog, “All of these new changes Facebook and Google+ have been implementing mean a few important things for marketers: an emphasis on personalization, advantages in social search, and even more movement toward creating a truly real-time web.” Personalization is something Facebook has been on top of for a while. The real-time web portion is something that is coming more and more into its own. She suggests that every time you post, make sure it is optimized with target keywords, because (and this makes perfect sense) social networks are indeed becoming more and more open to search.
All in all, it’s nice to sit back and watch the battle begin. You didn’t think that Brin and Page were gonna sit back and let ‘ol Zucky have all the fun did ya? I’m glad Marky Mark and the Facebook squad started getting hype on some upgrades. If they hadn’t, instead of getting Facebook users to sing about change, users might be humming another Cooke classic, “You Send Me” (over to Google+.)
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