Ask a question
AnonymousAnonymous asked:
You mention in a post that you were offered a job at Facebook years ago but declined. Do you wish you would have taken that position at the time? Do you see yourself comfortably working there now?

In hindsight, it was the right decision for me. This was back in 2006 and to take the offer I would have had to move to Palo Alto and work long hours in an office at a time when I loved living in Brooklyn and wanted to do the opposite, work-wise. It probably would have meant giving up on filmmaking entirely.

It’s easy to look at the upcoming IPO and do the math on stock options and think, hey, I’d be quite wealthy soon! But that would have required I move away from my life and stay at Facebook for at least five years, two things that would have completely changed the course of my life. Perhaps it all would have worked out swimmingly and I’d be a better person for it. But I never would have married Stacey, and for that reason alone, I think I made the right decision.

Facebook Subscriptions Solve the RSS Problem for Regular People

I’ve been including a meta link to my RSS feed on this site since early 2002. For a time, when I built my own XML/XSLT system using PHP back in 2004, I also included an alternative link to an Atom feed. Chances are, since you read this site, you probably know what RSS and Atom are. You probably even know what XML and maybe even XSLT are. But 98% percent of people who use the internet do not.

RSS, at its core, is a great idea. Take mostly-plaintext summaries (or full-length versions) of your content and put them in a single feed so various application types can download it regularly and cache it locally, allowing offline and collective access for users. Rather than checking 50 different URLs, a user can open, say, Reeder, and read all of their favorite websites in one pleasant go. If you get it, it’s great.

The problem is, most people don’t get it. They don’t click on those native RSS buttons and they certainly don’t use Reeder or another feed-reading app. I’ve tried, several times, to show my wife how the RSS functionality in Firefox works. I’ve added live subscriptions for all of her favorite sites, but she still clicks bookmarks every day. RSS is too complicated. Even worse, as a content publisher, there’s no way to combine streams of RSS data to give my readers all of my content in one place. I can’t mix my Flickr photostream with my Twitter updates with my posts from this website in one neat little package and give it to anyone who wants it (or, at least, not easily).

Facebook came close to solving this in the past. I could set my Twitter and Tumblr accounts to cross-post content to my Facebook wall, and since I post a copy of my photos and videos there too, my profile contained most of my important content in one place. The problem is that while it was ideal for anyone, it was only accessible to my Facebook friends. The inherent problem became: How do I share this content with people on Facebook who want it, but to whom I do not want to explicitly create a friendship? Many people took to approving any friend request and ended up with a thousand strangers as friends. I didn’t want to do that, though. I liked the idea of my Facebook friends list being a mostly-true collection of people I considered friends and acquaintances.

Tumblr also came close to solving this problem with its Dashboard feature. Any Tumblr user can follow my blog and their Dashboard will contain my posts from that point on. The Dashboard is well designed and easy to use, but the only way to get access to it is to create a Tumblr account (and, therefore, a blog), which a reader who doesn’t wish to post is unlikely to do for obvious reasons.

Recently, Facebook launched a new features called Subscriptions and solved the problem of RSS for regular folks. Now users can subscribe to my Facebook updates without us having to be friends. They’ll be able to see everything I post all in one place—photos, videos, Twitter updates and anything cross-posted from this site. For readers of this site who are RSS-savvy, this doesn’t really change anything. But for people who don’t use RSS and use Facebook, it creates a simplified version of subscriptions that feels more personal.

The one draw back here is Facebook friends who also read my website are, by default, seeing content twice. Luckily, anyone who doesn’t like this can unsubscribe from my updates but remain my friend, which is a nice touch. An additional benefit is Facebook allows my friends to comment on my posts whereas this site does not (subscribers, however, cannot). Of course, this all requires people interested in this sort of thing have a Facebook account, but these days more people use Facebook than have medical insurance.

The Problem with Facebook’s “Places”

Here’s the thing about Facebook that really gets under my skin: They are slowly incorporating the features from every other independent web application on the internet. This is not inherently a problem—companies get bigger and they begin to have the resources to widen their feature set—the issue is that Facebook doesn’t do these features any better. They win simply due to how many users they have. It feels like mass-produced mediocrity.

When Facebook launched Photos, they immediately became the largest photo-sharing site on the internet, eclipsing Flickr nearly overnight. The problem is Facebook’s Photos functionality isn’t nearly as nice as Flickr. They became the largest photo-sharing site immediately because they already had those users who, by and large, spend more time on their site than anywhere else. These users aren’t going to venture out to Flickr if they can just dump their SD cards into Facebook.

The same thing goes for Videos (sub-par compared to Vimeo and even YouTube). Vimeo is one of the best video-sharing applications in the world but it will never have nearly as many users as Facebook, so most people use Facebook instead.

And, most recently, Facebook launched Places, competing with Foursquare and Gowalla (my favorite). Places launched and 20 minutes later nearly everyone in my Facebook friends list had already checked in. It’s not that Facebook’s Places feature is bad, it’s just that it’s boring. It’s nothing special. They didn’t do it better than anyone else.

That’s the problem with Facebook. They are slowly destroying independent web applications with boring versions that immediately win due to Facebook’s population (which at this point is the 3rd largest country on earth). There’s no demand for excellence.