akrish

Everyone knows about Facebook. It’s a great social utility, and probably the most popular online social networking site out there. Almost all college-going students in the United States have accounts, and the craze is spreading to high schoolers, and even to adults (although slowly). Yet, the company may not have such a promising future. Ever since the opening of the so-called “Facebook Platform” to third party developers, the site has severely deteriorated and unless some changes are made, Facebook may start losing out to competing social networking sites.

“Facebook Platform” is essentially an API along with a way for developers to embed and integrate their applications into Facebook. It sounds great in theory; it allows other developers to capitalize on Facebook’s massive user base and it adds value to Facebook itself, by adding more cool features for their users. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Now, the site runs incredibly slowly, and many of the pages are too cluttered with third-party garbage for me to find what I’m looking for. It seems like Facebook would have been much better off without opening their website to other developers and instead just adding some more features of their own.

The thing that made Facebook so cool was its ease of use, but they seem to have lost some of that appeal. Nowadays, when I visit my friend’s profile pages to write something on their wall, it takes at least 15 seconds to fully load their page. The problem is that when I load someones page, I have to gather data from all of these different servers hosting the different applications, and this really slows things down. After that, I still have to scroll past all of their applications to get to their wall wasting even more of my time. Compare this to before, when people’s profile pages loaded almost instantaneously and weren’t filled with applications, and the old Facebook seems to be a lot better, at least in the “ease of use” sense. Ultimately, these two problems caused by the “Facebook Platform” are really taking away from the user experience on the site.

Although I don’t use any of the third-party apps, some of them are pretty cool I and can see why people like to have them. However, this doesn’t mean Facebook should compromise their performance just to allow them. I think they should have kept the site closed to external developers and just developed some of the cool apps internally. First off, this would really improve page load times because all apps would be requesting data from Facebook’s servers. Secondly, this would remove a lot of the garbage on pages because apps could be combined or better integrated. Since Facebook has more control than third-party developers, they are able to combine applications and present them a lot better than external developers can. Another option would be to have a thorough screening process of third-party applications. They can then restrict apps that take away from overall presentation of pages. Either approach probably would have worked better for Facebook in the long run, but the current “open” attitude doesn’t seem like it’ll work out.

I have a Facebook account, but have been using it less and less since the “opening.” I know there are other users that are annoyed with the latency and the ridiculously cluttered pages, but most people continue to use it. Maybe Facebook has such a monopoly on college student networking tools that it doesn’t really matter how bad the site is right now, but sooner or later someone is gonna design a networking site that looks a lot more like the old Facebook and I think they’ll beat out Facebook in the long run. It may end up being a trend with social networking utilities to be really good early on, but they slowly deteriorate after they’ve won over a large user base. It happened with myspace (which is now pretty terrible by the way) and it looks like it’s happening with Facebook.

Edited: August 12, 2007: Marc Andreessen wrote an article about the Facebook Platform soon after the platform was release. His opinion slightly differs from mine but he does mention the latency issues. Read it here.