Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.
But it's not a better and prettier interface. It's just awful. Granted, the only ads that appear on a Timeline page are in a narrow column off to the side (I didn't even know there were any ads until I specifically checked for them after reading this article), so I'm not sure how valid this conspiracy theory is. But it doesn't change the fact that Timeline looks horrible.
I think its interesting how mixed the response is. I'm rather indifferent on timeline, but I've talked to designer/UI/UX people who both love it and hate it, for various reasons. Apparently different people like different things.
It is worth noting that every change Facebook has ever made has been deemed awful by a significant number of people. I'm not certain Facebook, or anyone for that matter, could make an update that satisfies everyone.
It's important to keep in mind the scale of Facebook's user base. At nearly 900,000,000 users upsetting 1% of the users with a change creates 9,000,000 angry people.
Sponsored stories will begin appearing in the Timeline. That was the intent behind removing the straight chronological river (newsfeed), to be able to place ads into your stream in a way that looks more natural.
I think how it looks is subjective. I like the new look of it and how it's easy to see older content where before it was nearly impossible. I also think the idea of having these kind of communication records will be interesting later on when a younger generation can look back on someone's life experiences. Today we have very few of these kinds of records (outside of maybe some photos and letters) unless your family was very diligent about its history.
The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily.
This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'
Perhaps they're running out of ways to innovate and worthwhile things to do? Facebook, in its core is a very simple product. Most of the work I imagine is in making sure the servers don't crash. Sure everyone and their mom uses it, and it sounds sexy to work there, but actual work you do? Doesn't sound that complicated, cutting-edge or innovative. It's not like they're doing genetic engineering, or self driving cars.
As for not going with a straight chronological list, I think that really the idea behind Timeline is to take all the information that was put in Facebook and present it in something that is more akin to digital scrapbooking. They want you to have something more personal and emotional so that you're more attached to it. Their ad about it is clear about that: Facebook should be the place where you keep track of your life and expose it (a certain way) to and share it with your friends.
For that, you want to highlight a specific picture or event, but still have little anecdotes sprinkled here and there. They want you to go through the Timeline like you'd go through a photo album where you'd have a mix of the big events (graduation, marriage, births, etc.) with the little things, so that you can hear "oh, remember that one? When we went to Disneyland and you fell in the pool…", "you were so mad at him that day! Look at what you wrote on your wall…", etc.
Not having just a list makes it a bit more interesting to peruse. It's like going through a shoebox of photos and souvenirs, spread them out and you see some things, not others… I'm not saying they've nailed it, but it's a first version of it and it's an interesting experiment. It's hard to make an interesting photo album by hand, it's even harder to make something semi-automated.
As as side-note: The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
I find that interesting since I personally rarely see people's profiles or timelines.
Making a photo collection look interesting automatically is actually really straightforward. I think anyone who spends serious time attacking this problem will arrive at a solution.
Use the EXIF timestamp of when each photo was taken. Make a web page for each month, and group photos together by day to make it easy to skim through. Limit the number of photos shown on this page for any given day (put the rest on their own page) and you've automatically got variety. With those two simple organizational steps, viewers of the photo collection are set up for success in quickly finding photos that interest them, assuming there are some.
Agreed. I find it visually frustrating to read two columns simultaneously (going back/forth from left/right sides of the timeline). It's so cluttered I don't ever find myself visiting my own profile anymore.
About the only thing I use FB now for is the feed, but then Twitter serves the same function w/ better control over who I want to follow.
I'm pretty sure someone actually just saw Path and thought "that's kind of cool". (And then decided to implement it only on the web and not on the mobile.)
It's hard to say what facebook's intentions here without inside knowledge, but I wouldn't discount it. The founder of modern propaganda and advertising, Edward Bernays, performed many extremely subtle experiments that had dramatic shifts in how Americans behave to this day. (By the way, Bernays coined the phrase 'public relations' to replace 'propaganda' after it had been co-opted by the Nazis).
He got women to smoke by calling them 'freedom torches' and orchestrating high society women to light cigarettes in a demonstration for suffrage.
He facilitated the modern retail industry by shifting American behavior from a 'need-based' consumer to a 'want-based' consumer.
There are billions of dollars being spent to increase the effectiveness of advertising and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the world's biggest advertiser used subtle tactics to achieve this aim.
Google spends dollars to increase the relevance of advertising. Relevance is a means to effectiveness. Some of Google's most effective ads are relevant, text only, in the margins of pages. Propaganda and changing behaviors is a leap away from ad placement and layout online.
Facebook released Timeline so people want to publicize more of their life. More data = more advertising. I think business people use simple equations to justify their decisions.
The Century of The Self, a 4 part documentary by Adam Curtis, covers exactly what you just mentioned. Fascinating stuff, and available in its entirety on youtube.
Surely the entire of facebook constitutes one big "secret psychological advertising conspiracy." That sounds like a perfect description to me, if you discount the alarmist, x-files connotations of "conspiracy."
Neuromarketing is a pretty standard practice now, I don't think any of this is controversial.
I agree. I can't see how anyone would imagine that Facebook aren't working hard at their job, which is, in fact, delivering ads and making people click on them. Or that all that investment is spent paying smart people to have fun and sow the seeds of happiness worldwide, and every once in a while pay a little attention to the business model as an afterthought.
I would really, really appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we ever applied the term "conspiracy theory" to the common-sense assumption that a for-profit company's business decisions are motivated by (gasp, shock) profit.
By making your users your priority you create an environment where they want to be and will continue to use your platform. Putting your users first allows you to continue to profit through means like advertisements. If you put your users second to profits you'll quickly alienate them. I tend to think consumer facing companies like Facebook and Google really do think of their users first, but perhaps I'm just naive.
I think you're contradicting yourself by saying their concern for users derives from profit and then saying they put their users "first." If acquiring and keeping users is a means to an end, namely advertising revenue, then users are secondary to advertising revenue. Is there some other dynamic in the corporation (other than profit) that drives Facebook and Google to value users? If the answer is human good will, then I can believe it has some influence in some cases, but not that it ever overrides profit. Good will can be influential where there is a sincere belief that it is the best guide to long-term profit, and I think Google's founders were fairly successful in instilling that belief in their corporate culture, but in a mass consumer business that belief will be worn down through the process of making many small decisions where the two priorities conflict.
I think these companies view the users as the purpose and the advertising as the means - not the other way around. Both Google and Facebook were born out of an interest to improve the world and solve a problem. This idealism along with thinking long term about the product is what puts users first. I think the conflicts always tend to resolve on the side of benefiting users (ads that are relevant to a user's interest, or sponsored search results that are likely what the user is looking for anyway). The goal is to make a profit in a way that also adds utility to the user and doesn't distract from the main 'mission' of the company whatever that may be - and I don't think it is to make money.
Companies that become entirely about perpetuating their own existence, where the means of profiting becomes their purpose, seem to use nasty business practices and power to ruin competition rather than compete on product quality. They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice. I don't think this method is a good long term solution and from my perspective I don't think Facebook or Google are acting in this way (at least for now).
I think the conflicts always tend to resolve on the side of benefiting users (ads that are relevant to a user's interest, or sponsored search results that are likely what the user is looking for anyway)
We justify advertising because so many of the products and companies we love are built on it, plain and simple. Advertising is "good" in the same sense that pollution is good: in a world without it, much of what we love wouldn't exist. The assumption that Google or Facebook ad revenue reflects value delivered to their users is extremely, extremely dubious, and I don't even see a prima facie case for it. When a rational actor spends money, that's good evidence that it is receiving value, but nobody would model a Facebook user making purchases as a rational actor. If they did, the ads would look rather different. So what basis do we have for saying that effective ads benefit users, except as a way of funding the service by extracting payment from users' attention budgets instead of from their bank accounts?
At one time, people loved seeing smokestacks belching smoke because that meant prosperity, jobs, and abundance. On HN, I think we feel the same way about ads. More effective ads on the web means more prosperity, more employment, and more products for us to enjoy.
Both Google and Facebook were born out of an interest to improve the world and solve a problem
I give credit to Google for having a corporate culture that reflects its founders, but in the long run, survival and profit are more fundamental in a corporation's hierarchy of needs. With Google we probably won't know exactly when it becomes just like AT&T or GM or any other large corporation; we'll recognize it sometime after the fact. Even in their current state, they're still a business with accountants, investors, and quarterly statements. The people who work there are ambitious and want to buy nice stuff; they get goals and reviews and promotions. All the elements that cause corporations to operate at a much lower moral level than the people they're made of are present. The corporate culture can only hold those forces back for so long.
As for Facebook, when did people start regarding them as a benevolent, well-intentioned company (distinct from their great product which really does improve the world?) I knew they were out to change the world and shape the future, but it seemed like improving the world happened as a side effect.
They usually stagnate, alienate their users and only maintain market share by ensuring users have no other choice.
First, you're describing the corporations that emerged victorious from previous great changes; don't underestimate how dominant that behavior can be. Someday, long after Google's "not evil" ethic is no longer an asset they have to lose, standard corporate tactics will be the best way for them to deliver shareholder value. And the shareholders will get their value. Second, it sounds like you're describing Facebook right now. I have Diaspora and Google+ accounts, but of course Facebook is the one I check all the time. Facebook can do almost anything to me and not lose me as a customer, for the simple reason that current social networks don't interoperate and therefore social networking accounts aren't portable from one provider to another in any meaningful way.
EDIT (abusing the edit function to reply): I agree with you that calling Facebook or any other company "malevolent" is incorrect. I think it's better to say that sometimes a company's interests are aligned with the interests of their users, and sometimes they aren't. I also agree that it looks like Google's and even Facebook's interests are aligned with their users' interests in many ways. However, that will change someday, and the very smart guys at Google and Facebook will start acting on that change of interest before we even recognize it.
Also, I really don't see it as them "tricking" us. They aren't doing anything deceitful or morally wrong. They're just doing their job, which is to deliver profitable ad clicks to the advertisers who pay them. We don't have to pretend that they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts (or that their advertising is good for us) in order to respect what they do and appreciate the service they provide.
Facebook often advertises products related to user information (merchandise from a movie for example). If it's something the user may be interested in buying they hadn't thought about but noticed from that ad, I see that as a benefit of targeted advertising. I'm not sure I understand your point about this.
As far as Google and Facebook I think they recognize that they're better off taking care of their users for long term success. I suppose you could argue this is only a temporary stance based on company culture, but I don't know if I'd agree with it.
Facebook takes a lot of heat and is often talked about on HN as this malevolent advertising company (privacy be damned), but to me this criticism always seemed overblown. I've always personally viewed them as actually trying to do what they say they're trying to accomplish. As far as the last point about Facebook being dominant, just because a company is dominant doesn't mean they're entirely about perpetuating their own existence. Facebook still rapidly makes changes and improves their platform, they also didn't do anything anti-competitive to try and destroy Google+ or Diaspora (I think Mark even donated to Diaspora).
This is all background to why I think the OP's article is unlikely. I think these companies build new features to keep their users happy and using their site, not design new features with the main purpose of secretly tricking them into more advertising. It isn't all about profit.
We need to ask a simple question - what are the metrics that Facebook seek to optimise?
I can't imagine a universe in which they aren't placing at least some weight on the standard suite of "engagement" metrics. If that is the case, then they're seeking to increase the amount of time you spend on the site, the number of pages you view, the number of ads you see (and click), the frequency with which you scroll below the cut and so on.
Creating an interface that provides fast, easy access to the most relevant information means that most of your core metrics get worse. Facebook would have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally far-sighted for their interface to do anything but get worse. They would need a corporate culture that is either centralised and vision-led, or utterly indifferent to short-term measures of engagement and profitability. Zuckerberg is a smart man, but he's not a Steve Jobs or a Larry Page.
This reminds of a story mentioned in Steven Levy's "In The Plex". Larry and Sergey are showing off their page rank algorithm to a search engine company early on showing how much better and faster it is. The person they're showing it to is upset at how fast it is saying, "it's too good". He wanted the search to be slow so that users would be stuck on the search engine page longer and view more ads. Larry and Sergey left thinking the guy was an idiot.
I don't think it takes that much intuition to realize that treating your users well and building something for them will be better in the long run.
big companies are good at executing established business models, and bad at discovering new ones. small companies, the opposite. it could never be any other way.
I don't about the conspiracy behind timeline , but timeline just made it difficult for em to read through my posts , some stay on left some on left.
It would be good , if they keep whole month's content on 1side and next on other . It helps me viewing .
But its not better and its not prettier, its a mess and one I generally completely avoid. I used to occasionally click on peoples profiles especially if I was considering connecting, now its such an assault on the senses I don't bother. My FB useage as a result is probably declining...
Or the Facebook Timeline is their New Coke--they can roll it out, then in a few months roll back to something similar, but not exactly the same as, the old layout.
If it is their New Coke, then what you mean is they can roll it back to something exactly the same, and then have conspiracy nuts repeat nonsense claims that it is different now. New Coke was not a way to distract people while they changed the recipe of classic, classic didn't change.
Well, according to Snopes this is a myth; bottlers had been allowed to use HFCS in original Coke prior to the introduction of New Coke. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
The new product continued to be sold and retained the name Coca-Cola (until 1992, when it was officially renamed Coca-Cola II), so the old product was named Coca-Cola Classic, also called Coke Classic, later just Coke and for a short period of time it was referred to by the public as Old Coke. Many who tasted the reintroduced formula were not convinced that the first batches really were the same formula that had supposedly been retired that spring. This is partially true because Coca-Cola Classic differed from the original formula, as all bottlers who hadn't already done so were using high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar to sweeten the drink
What Coca Cola actually ships from Atlanta is the syrup, unsweetened. The bottlers add water and sugar to this, and AFAIK [1], it is up to their discretion what type of sugar to use.
This is one of the reasons that Coke tastes different in different places - a can of Coke in Montreal is very different from one in Toronto.
I'd have fact-checked this, but for some reason, Wikipedia is down... :)
[1] Perhaps this is no longer the case, but it certainly was in 1989, when I "interned" at a Coke bottling facility in Harare, Zimbabwe for a week
I was just talking to a friend about timeline and how hard it is to navigate. I can't even go on friends pages that use it - it's just too hard to get used to, especially when almost everyone else uses the regular interface.
Can't be certain, but I know that from a subjective perspective my brain feels the same way browsing timeline as it does when I'm doing math or reasoning intently. The experience of cognitive strain is present in both cases.
One example in the book is that even hard to read fonts can cause cognitive strain and make you judge the content of the text differently. I see that as being largely analogous.
From my reading of the book (and the exerpt you have mentioned here), I'd agree that System 2 is in play when looking at the Timeline; it does create some cognitive load.
However, I can't remember anything backing your assertion that System 2 is more susceptible to advertising. In fact, my reading is the opposite: System 1 cannot help but read words or look at images, and it is easily swayed by various advertising techniques. It would be System 2 that processes what's happening, realizes you are trying to be sold something that you probably don't want/need, then rejects it. Isn't it a lack of engagement of System 2 that leads people to instinctively click ads or follow spam links?
Having followed the changes in their platform for years that doesn't seem to be the case. It s probably somebody new wanting to try some new idea. Zynga does have an optimization engine in place, Facebook does trial and error too much: profile boxes, tabs, no boxes, top stories etc, it's just pointless variations of a newsfeed.
I like the new Timeline feature but the inability for me to switch to some sort of "old" view when I just want to see a perfect list of updates without any fancy grouping an annoyance. For casual use the Timeline is good but it leaves a lot to be desired when I want to see everything.
Joking. But the Timeline view in the iOS app places all items in a single column.
That said, Facebook has basically become a place where I sync my tweets and other services like Instagram so that people that I know who don't use Twitter yet can see them.
I love the timeline layout.. id rather scroll easily through stuff from a couple of years ago and get a good overview of what I was doing than go through photo galleries I have on my PC with no context or further information.
It has its rough edges, but I have to say that scrolling down the Timeline is a more personal and emotional experience than can be found anywhere else.
Your argument doesn't compute. You're comparing content (photo gallery) with a design structure. The "two column" grid includes photos, locations, new friends, comments, etc.
Perhaps I should've been more specific. His argument was that scrolling down timeline is one of the most emotional experiences.
Scrolling through a haphazard column system of photos of mishmash isn't that emotional to me. Going one by one through a persons Facebook album is more emotional to me because of the focus (one photo) and organization (I know which album I picked).
Photos are a pretty emotional experience, true. However I think there's a major difference. Typically photos on my facebook represent moments, short memories in time... mostly happy.
Looking at a photo makes me remember the context of the photo. However a status update is different. They're more frequent, they're less significant. They give context around the less important things.
For example, I remember the first time I looked at my timeline there was a status update that said something along the lines of "Oh man new doughnut at the Dunkin!" I wrote it a few years ago, and it was Completely pointless, and meaningless.. but then I remembered it, because later that day my mom was hit by a car. The entire events of that day flashed in my mind. Frankly that was pretty emotional for me.
I think the formulation that "the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads" is awfully reductive. Reading Steven Levy's In the Plex really gave me a sense of what the people at Google are actually about, and it's not just making money. There's a somewhat naive idealism at work that you can judge however you want, but you should acknowledge its existence.
While I tend to give the people at Facebook less credit, I do think there's a similar idealism at the core of the project. But I think they're fundamentally undermining human connection in many subtle ways that I've written about on my blog. Specifically, and more to the point, I think Timeline undermines the human intimacy of private sharing for the benefit of public performance.
Isn't this the basis of "disruption"? Change the format and you cause people to look more closely at something. Users will get used to timeline and they'll have to change again. Also I'm skeptical of the statement "facebook will be changing the way our brains process advertising".
The problem I have with Timeline is the awful way that it organizes posts. The two column format is awkward and it makes it hard to search or even casually read posts as you scroll down, because your eyes are darting between the two columns rather than one. The grouping is pretty crap, too.
As much as I want to like it, I don't even try to read people's profiles anymore.
If Facebook wanted me to pay 100% attention to the Status feed, they've succeeded. And by Status feed, I don't mean whatever that thing on the right frame is. Who reads that anyway?
I agree, they've pretty much broken every single UI convention by having information chronologically separated in between columns. As a society, we're used to following down a column because of the breaks, like a newspaper. For some stupid reason, Facebook has broken this convention and made posts go back and forth between the column break which is idiotic.
What I despise is the lack of privacy, because if I tag a photo with a friend's name, all their friends can see it, regardless of my privacy settings which forces me to no longer tag my friends.
I basically have stopped using Facebook except for reading up on the newsfeed.
Very interesting. I know what I'll be doing with my afternoon.
I lacked this language, but yes I think that's a fair reading of my position.
There's a broader argument that facebook really is providing a valuable service to us by making us aware of products and services that really will make our lives better. I'm unmoved by that claim, as I suspect most of us are.
>"the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.”
I always chuckle at thoughts like this. If we want to rank on a scale of intellect it isn't clear that simply being a Google/Facebook/<insert tech company here> employee puts you in the 'smartest in the world' bucket.
There are PLENTY of people that aren't software engineers that are likely much smarter than anyone at any of these companies, unless we are to say that you can't be smart unless you are a software engineer, which seems silly.
It is in the same bucket with the clearly false 'we only hire the smartest people in the world' meme, also trumpeted by a lot of tech companies.
But "s/world/high tech/g" (and maybe "s/smartest/some of the smartest/g") and the broader point still stands, even without the hyperbole: lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Not maybe, definitely. Unless you are trying to make the claim that the set of the smartest people in tech is a proper subset of the employees of Google (or Google employees unioned with Facebook employees). I think lots and lots of very smart people that don't work for Google or Facebook would strongly disagree, and evidence is on their side.
>lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Yes, but lots and lots of very smart people are also doing <insert other kind of tech venture here>. The statement seems to pre-suppose that there is no or little value in the work they do and they should be working on more 'valuable' problems.
I personally hate advertising, but I don't look down on people that work at Google or Facebook if their job involves increasing click-through rates, nor do I believe having smart people focused on these kind of tasks is 'holding us back' in any meaningful way. To believe so implies that 'smart people' can excel/advance the state of the art for anything they work on, and thus they should focus on more 'important' things. If these smart people were attracted to doing these more important things that may be true, but then they would probably be doing them already. If they are attracted to what they are doing then they should continue, and do it as best they can. Further it ignores the idea that there are side-effects of their work that could be more valuable to the world as a whole (like new discoveries in machine learning, or algorithms, or even human psychology).
The fundamental currency that buys advancement is intelligence, creativity and passion for what you are doing. If you have 2 out of 3 you are unlikely to contribute meaningfully, and simply reassigning everyone at Google to work on say self-driving cars is unlikely to yield reliable, self-driving cars any faster, in fact it would likely cripple the effort.
You are not the target audience. Yes, if you're reading this, you are not the audience that Facebook is building for. The Timeline is there after being extensively tested and stays there are long as the results (Facebook definition) are better than the alternative.
In case you missed it, to be clear - you are not the target audience.
The problem with timeline, for me, is lack of context. Scroll back to the beginning of my life on facebook and you see exchanges between me and my then girlfriend.
Scrolling through 5 years worth of status updates gave you context for this (sortof), it was psychologically "far" away.
Being able to just click "2006", and easily see that stuff is creepy.
This is why I can't stand this timeline nonsense.
So...do I delete all of this stuff? I don't have a problem with these things being a part of my history, I just don't like them being presented in such a readily-available way...
I have similar feelings about this. I'm deleting everything that isn't part of my current life, and I've all but stopped posting. It's a shame, really.
This is also my main problem with it. The idea is nice to have some sort of diary where you log important events in your life so that you can scroll back in someone's history and see when important things happened.
But sometime before Timeline, Facebook made a change so that each post has an individual visibility to give users more control or whatever, and when I switched over to Timeline, all my old posts that weren't private automatically appeared on my timeline, and I can't easily change the visibility of all those old posts, that are now much more easily accessible.
I want the newer posts on my Timeline to be visible, so others can see the latest crap I shared with my friends, but I want the older posts to fade into obscurity, unless I actively bring them back again.
Thanks, but you can only set past post visbility to "Friends", not "Private", and I don't see any definition of how old a post has to be to be considered a "past post".
I, unlike others, love Timeline, but I think the product cast too wide a net. Do I want to go back and revisit posts I made in 2006? I sure do, and love to be able to do that easily.
Do I want others to do that? Well, not so much. Timeline would have been a perfect product in my view if it only applied to your own profile.
I can't be the only person who has never used timelines?
I assumed other people used facebook like me: To read what friends had posted, maybe occasionally post myself and respond to messages/events, nothing more.
The only timeline I have seen was one in which my friend put a picture of baby Jesus as his birth picture...
Along these same lines, one could say that Timeline's addition of the personalized banner image with the user's name across it makes users look more like brands, possibly in an attempt to desensitize Facebook users to the difference between brands and actual people.
If anyone else had trouble reading the site because of font rendering in Firefox (what is up with those r's, D's and S's!?), I found readability made it digestible.
The biggest benefits of timeline are (1) making it easier to see stuff in the past and (2) calling out the most memorable important events/content while hiding less important stuff. They could have done this in a list format, but using the Timeline makes it much more clear that important things are being called out while some other things are being left hidden.
It's a powerful solution to the problem of browsing all of a user's content over time, which was very difficult in the old profile. And it's a perfectly good reason for Facebook to try Timeline without ascribing ulterior motives.
I'd never heard of System1/2 before, but it makes a lot of sense. Sites that are similar to the FB timeline, like Pinterest (which I recently signed up on to try it out), also give me that same sense of having to 'pay attention' more. It becomes more of a novelty instead of something that I'd want to use all the time. I think that is part of the popularity of sites like Craigslist and Hackernews, which present the information in an easily scanned format. They both fall into System 1. I think that as I do UX design for my site, I'll keep this in mind.
>> "When information is organized in a list, it’s trivially easy to scan it, but with Timeline your eye has to dart around and try to combine the layout into an understanding of what the person’s been up to. It induces cognitive strain"
Well, the whole idea is to engage the user. They hang around a lot more when they engage. If you give somebody a list they will trivially take the head the second time onwards ( they will pop the stack, for any imperative folks out there ). That's because the very first time, you actually traverse the list. From then on, the head tells you if the list has mutated. So your brain will save you the cognitive load by simply taking the head of the list and then saying to you, look, there is no need to engage further since there hasn't been any destructive update since the last time you looked. So you will log off.
To prevent disengagement, all creative media ( magazines, newspapers, movies, comics, TV etc. ) will assault you on multiple fronts. So you don't get a list anymore. So Time magazine will have multiple columns on the same page, with each column corresponding to a different topic. One of those columns will have a picture, another an ad, the third an infographic, the fourth some text, and so on. I took a bunch of semesters of screenplay writing where this stuff is actually taught in some gory detail - how to keep the viewer hooked. Never be linear - the viewer is smart and will simply (and often correctly) guess where the movie is headed. So confuse the viewer by presenting information in a non-linear fashion deliberately, and occasionally throw interesting but unrelated bits of filler/second unit stock footage into the plot. Spice things up. I believe it was the british who came up with the more accurate term "sex it up".
That's what facebok is doing.
Frankly, it works very well - for the non-programmer types. Lets be clear, your life isn't all that interesting. If I just show you status updates in a list, you will be bored stiff after a point. But if I introduce a tiny element of stochastic displacement in your timeline, you will wonder, hey, where did this come from , when did I do that, etc. That'll keep you engaged, and that translates to a longer duration on the site => more $$
I think Facebook timeline differs in a fundamental way from, lets say, newspapers.
Newspapers work well with multiple columns because there's no inherent connecting features. Sure a page from the sports section will all have sports related items, but in general all the columns stand by themselves.
Facebook timeline is united by time. As in, what I say at the top of my timeline might be directly related to what I said before, and that might be directly related to what i said before that, and so on. So as humans, we want to read objects in the way they were chronologically presented. But on the new timeline, in order to do this, we have to zig zag from left to right, to left again. This isn't engaging the user just as making me do jumping jacks while I read isn't engaging -- yes it is spicing up my reading experience, but that just forces me to relearn something that is harder than what I was doing originally.
If the timeline was broken up into pieces, I could deal with that. Wall posts on the left, images and polls on the right, etc. Give my eyes some logical way to focus on only a part of my screen. But the exact middle of the screen on Facebook is a dividing line between left and right that presents almost identical information, and I have to form a structure from that.
Taking another example, in movies, it makes sense that the movie makers try to confuse and sex up a movie -- our brains want to be stimulated. But there's a difference between spicing the content of entertainment and spicing up the delivery method that content is offered -- imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy.
It's confusing when you focus on the columns. Focus on the line in the middle and read the branches. It becomes just as easy to read as before, and with greater information density.
That does seem to help, but I still feel it breaks two common usability notions:
1) Lines are used to divide content and guide our eyes to what is important. In this case, we have to travel "across the line" to see the next piece of content which may be related, which breaks common notions.
2) Our mind usually focuses on the largest items on a page and then goes to the smaller details afterwards (Like how magazine article titles are always bigger than the text below it). In this case, after the top photo, my eyes move towards the bigger content boxes than the thin line in the middle.
EDIT: A third one!
3) If we focus on the line, the content to the left of the line becomes slower to read than the content to the right of the line. When we look to the left of the line, our eyes have to travel across the entire box to get to the start of the status. When our eyes travel to the right, the status starts a lot closer (due to text being written from left to right)
Here's an example:
Its a great day to be a programmer | I can't believe I got this job!
If you read this left to right, its fairly to read. But if you start in the middle at the line and want to read the left comment, your eyes have to go all the way to the left to get to the beginning, then come all the way back to where they were in the middle at the line. When you read the comment to the right, the text starts immediately.
Yes, but you don't read a book by looking at the spine first, then reading the left page, back to the spine, and then the right. We read everything to the left of the spine (the dividing line, if you will), then read all the content to the right of the spine.
What do you mean? Burn Notice typically has two plots running at once (the plot that advances the overall story arc, and then the per-episode plot where they help someone), and they like to switch back and forth between the plots frequently, but they never show them at the same time.
Lately they've used split-screen to show simultaneous actions by different people. It works rather well, because while the videos show different actions, they both fit into the same coordinated plan.
For a few seconds at a time, during transitions between scenes or in the lead up to advert breaks. Synchronicity of relevant actions is minimum - ie a car driving, while someone sits in a room. the other two may be 2 sides of the same phone call.
There's not really ever 2 concurrent plots happening simultaneously.
That's not the same thing. Burn Notice (and more notably, 24) use that technique for very short periods of time to change things up. And during that time there is never anything important going on in any of the 2 scenes--no one is going to risk half the viewers missing a relevant plot point just because they happened to be focusing on the wrong half of the screen at that moment.
Try going to Fry's and finding a spot where they have 2 TVs next to each other that are showing different channels. Try just watching one of them: It's maddening. To me it's equivalent to animated ads on web pages--it just makes it impossible to concentrate.
But with Burn Notice, they don't expect you to concentrate on just one of the scenes... instead, you look at both or all of them at once, and you get a pretty good idea about what's going on in all of them. This is possible because meaning-wise, video is usually very sparse; lots of people "watch" shows while doing other things, and still have a sense of continuity about the story the show is telling. I also find this a bit distracting, but many people I know seem to use this as the default paradigm of watching TV.
However, the thing I find interesting is other people in the comments here have mentioned that they just look at the center and take in what's going on on both sides, which is exactly the same technique, and Facebook timelines are sparse in the same way that video is. It's easy to get a sense of what your Facebook friends are doing with a quick skim, without fully concentrating on any particular post. During this skim, your attention might be drawn to a specific post, but if it's not, you've absorbed a high-level overview and moved on, without having to read each post individually.
This describes the verge vs engadget, I like the content on the verge more but on engadget it's much easier to tell where I left off from my last visit. On the verge I always feel like stories have slipped through because the content is so non linear.
I think what you are describing works in certain mediums, but not well or at all in others.
Fascinating. This explains why I hate so much these kind of newspaper, and would hate Facebook timeline if I used Facebook.
However, both are wrong in trying to artificially catch user attention and time. It is like blackhat SEO, may work for a while, but it not sustainable. while but it is
> To prevent disengagement, all creative media ( magazines, newspapers, movies, comics, TV etc. ) will assault you on multiple fronts.
I don't think that works for everyone. I can read an issue of The Economist -- which primarily has a clean, linear layout of two or three columns per page -- basically cover to cover. But take something garishly laid out like Esquire, and my brain and eyes start to revolt after a couple of pages.
I found timeline confusing at first, but then I realized if I focus on the line in the middle then reading posts becomes just as orderly as it was before, with the added benefit of greater information density. It also unclutters the left side of the page which was a column before. And also by turning the background blue it gives better contrast to the news/chat panels on the right. About a third of my friends have switched over now, and old profiles just look old. The large banner was a nice touch as well.
Re: "the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads."
Maybe the third-smartest. The smartest people in the world probably aren't working hard, period. The second-smartest people are working hard to build shit that sells itself.
I agree with the headline but I think the real purposes is to drive more people to the news feed instead of browsing profiles. The ads are inserted into the news streams.
As a layperson, I think Kahneman's work is brilliant and I can't wait to read the book, but do understand that to the actual evil scientists - research psychologists - he is Donald Knuth, not, um, whoever's hot in CS these days. They think his ideas revolutionized the field a few decades ago, and it's great that he finally got his book published, but meanwhile, we've learned a lot and that whole dual-system thing is kinda quaint.
So lucky for us, if Facebook were really basing their designs around what is more Poor Richard's Almanac than the Bible, we can build far more compelling experiences than Facebook using actual cutting-edge psychology - and I feel kinda lucky to get paid to do just that.
Why [Everyone Else] Is a Hypocrite -Kurzban
How The Mind Works -Pinker
The Stuff of Thought -Pinker
The Evolution of Human Sexuality -Symons
Where Mathematics Comes From -Lakoff & Nunez
Passions Within Reason -Frank
Culture of Honor -Nisbett & Cohen
Dan Ariely at MIT has picked up where Kahneman and Tversky left off in terms of behavioural economics. He has written a few books.
That said, Kahneman Tversky and Ariely dont deal with scene perception - which is what you would want to look into if you were interested in planting ads. They all started off as vision researchers then shifted into deeper cognitive work.
If you want some scene perception look into Dan Simons or Ron Rensink.
> Timeline also makes branded posts (ads) look nearly identical to the actual content we’re on facebook to see, so it follows that they’d be processed similarly.
I'm not sure what the author is referring to, but the ads on the side (regrettably IMO) look nothing like the organic content in the main Timeline columns. There isn't enough space to show more organic content on the side as there is next to the Newsfeed. Why does the OP think that the ads are "nearly identical" to organic content?
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