How Facebook is squelching adoption
One of the things that excited me about Facebook when I first joined was the possibility of promoting events. (I wrote about what I thought after first joining on the Bluelime blog.) I didn’t mention the slightly annoying fact that there was no network for the Sunshine Coast. “OK,” I grumbled, “we’re kind of small. I guess I’ll just join Vancouver.”
Now slightly annoying has become a major issue for me because I can’t create events unless they exist in a known city. The customer service rep told me to “choose a supported network nearby”, and “We hope to add that city in our next network expansion.”. The Sunshine Coast looks close to Vancouver on a map, but being dependent on a ferry ride between, it’s not a trivial distance. Not like we’re a suburb. So there’s really no point in me creating events at all. And of course being excited about the possibility of events promotion, I was planning to promote the feature to others through my use etc.
I can’t help but think there’s a better way to handle the growth of networks than by waiting for Facebook to create them. Surely some kind of tagging model, maybe with some moderation for misspellings or something… something a bit more organic, would foster greater adoption of the network-dependent features. (Hmm maybe something like how Google suggests search terms could help…)
I suggest moderation etc. because I realize there are issues to be faced with this idea. I worked years ago on a system that let users type in their cities during account creation, and the typos alone made it an unmanageable mess for reporting… But I think the viral growth and scale of a site like Facebook absolutely needs a better solution to the question of where my event is happening. Because now, according to Facebook, it’s just not.
Posted: June 30th, 2007 under Design, Peeves, Usability & HCI.
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