Facebook turned 6 yesterday and the company claims to have reached 400 million users – with 200 million added just in the last one year.
Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better. We hoped Facebook would improve people’s lives in important ways. So it’s rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.
For me personally, this has meant being able to remain close and connected to schoolmates, family and colleagues while working hard at building Facebook over the past six years. It has also been especially meaningful to me and to everyone at Facebook to see people using Facebook to seek help, share news and lend support during crises. – Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook is one classic company which asks it’s userbase on privacy policy to new features, yet makes the perfect balance between customer feedback and what’s right for the business.
If you go back to Facebook’s history of controversies, significant ones started in 2006 when Facebook launched “News Feed”, that displayed recent Facebook activities of the member’s friends.
There was a major dissatisfaction among user base and the same ‘Face-off’ happened when Facebook opened it’s service to ‘anybody with a valid email address’. Members revolted, as Facebook was meant to be a close college network and opening up to everybody meant losing the premium-ness of being part of Facebook.
And the result?
It’s 2010 and 70% of Facebook growth has happened outside of the United States.
Imagine what would Facebook be if it listened to user’s dissatisfaction. Not that Facebook doesn’t listens to it’s user feedback (they keep flip-flopping the privacy rules depending on the intensity of dissatisfaction), but the most important point that one needs to keep in mind is that
‘a user is not the user’
User feedback/dissatisfaction has to be taken with a pinch of salt and the company needs to take a tough stand, if they ‘know their business’.
Does this signify pure arrogance and complete apathy towards customer feedback on part of Facebook? Facebook is a social networking product and a conversation among its members is the key offering. How can then Facebook risk disapproval of the very channel and way in which these conversations are taking place and getting shared on its network?
Or on the flip side, does this hint at how well Zukerberg knows his customers. Zukerberg knows why his users come to the site, and also at the same time perfectly understands why they would stay with Facebook. There is always a resistance to any change (whether good or bad), and when it is change to something as routine as Facebook has become for millions across the world, it was bound to create some noise. – [Listen to Customers or Innovate? — Lessons from Facebook Redesign]
Your users hate change and will be dissatisfied if there is any disruption in their regular life. The only way out is to do a little bit of hand holding and keep showing them the bigger picture/more value.
What’s your opinion?
As Henry Ford once said, “If you asked people what they wanted, they’d still answer – faster horses”.
Well, few years ago all these users flocked to MySpace & Orkut and today Facebook & twitter, and may be something else 3-4 yrs from now
Remember Yahoo had more than 500 million users at some point and it was an internet darling. I somehow guess Facebook will go the yahoo way everybody is done with farming on farmville
I really like your point “a users is not the user” but it’s nice to know that they are at least still empathetic to “a user”. thus far I do know they are only rolling it out to 80 million of the 400 million, true they could have tested it out on even less people to get statistically significant results.
I was just commenting about this on Venture Beat, here’s what I said:
I got the update and I think it looks good, the few features like the message, notifications, and friend request at the top make it a great way to get an overview of that stuff at a glance. I know they they keep fiddling around with the Live News and Recent News, or now its “Top News” and “Most Recent” yet I think the Top News is still unclear. The main question is what parameters are used to determine what is “Top News” I usually just go straight to the Recent News which is now “Most Recent” because I assume its a time line of everything with nothing missing from the stream. With Top News, I know it’s leaving some stuff out but it would be more useful if I know why I should read it or share it. I wish I could customize it, like have my own custom listing separate from these two and I could pick and choose what I wanted to see. It would be basically “Most Recent” minus profile photo updates, minus app updates, minus news/updates from pages, maybe my own status updates since I don’t need to see what I wrote, and any others that I can’t think of at this moment.
Personally I think it’s great that they will phase out outside notification because I get tired of getting so may notifications from applications that are just mundane or repetitive however, it will be difficult for websites using Facebook connect who have acquired many users yet still don’t have access to their emails because they are only recording the token key. Notifications are the only way to reach these people so hopefully there is an alternative to this. I don’t mind notification just want to separate the important ones from the less important ones.
I started a list on baduku.com to compare the goods and bads of the new interface layout, feel free to add to it. http://www.baduku.com/topics/new-facebook-layout-2010-good-or-bad_1199
The right answer is there are no fixed/right answers or paradigms in the consumer business. What worked for Facebook will not work for or for Unilever. And vice versa. Perhaps it will not work for Facebook again.
The problem is people look for a ‘mantra’ where none exists. Any one who blindly applies lessons from Facebook, Yahoo, Google…or P&G will be rewarded with a swift kick in the pants.
The right perspective is ‘keep at it’; you are going to be right on some things, wrong on others. As long as the hits are more than misses, you continue to be in business. The task is to keep buzzing; keep lighting fires.
The Black Swan (Taleb) should make instructive reading.
Rajesh
I have heard a lot of startups say “Customers are always right”, but the successful startups toe the line “The Best customers/ The most number of customers are always right”.
In my experience the best companies are those who look into which customers are going to get them the highest ROI. Given that most customers are fickle , it makes sense to invest in those products and features which would be desirable to most of the customers( in case of facebook) and the best customers ( customers with high life time value)in case of retailers.
This is not the complete picture but it is usually the base adopted by many successful startups and as matter of fact most of the sucessful retailers.