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The Collapse of Facebook

Posted by Matt in Social Networks on October 25th, 2009

When a builder sets out to construct a skyscraper, he does not simply bulldoze the land, dig some holes, and start building. He relies on architects, structural engineers, designers, and artists to provide him a complete set of blueprints. Ones that will ensure that the building doesn’t collapse 10, 20, or even 30 years after completion. The building is designed with beauty, stability, and purpose. If it lacks beauty, no one will want to look at it; if no stability, nobody will use it for fear of collapse; if no purpose, it may sit vacant and empty indefinitely.

So is a company. No corporate entity exists without a purpose, collapses in on itself without a good foundation and stable management, and is shunned if it provides no aesthetic potential in the eyes of its users. Yes, the title of this entry may be a bit sensational and rather unbelievable on the whole, but may I suggest that it is indeed a great possibility in the not-so-distant future. Maybe not next year or even five years, but without serious changes from within, I believe that Facebook will eventually experience a serious meltdown–a casualty of its own existence.

There’s no doubt that Facebook had one of the highest growth rates of any web company in the relatively recent past. Since its inception in 2004 as a sort of “online yearbook,” it grew from only a handful of users to more than 300 million. That’s a huge amount of growth for a company not even 6 years old. Growth that explosive must be carefully managed lest the company’s infrastructure grow so rapidly that you end up with a structure that looks more like spaghetti than an organizational hierarchy. I can’t comment directly on Facebook’s organizational charts, but I hypothesize that the company may be in need of some restructuring based on the following points.

Poor Design and Structure

Facebook’s design and website structure have degraded over the past two years. If you used Facebook around 2 years ago, you’ll recall a site structure that was easy to navigate, it was simple to find contact information, adjust privacy settings, keep track of happenings in your friends’ lives, etc. The type of information displayed in the news feed was easy to sort through and interact with. Since then we’ve been through at least two relatively major redesigns of the site. I still sometimes have to hunt through menus and buttons in order to find exactly what I’m looking for. Even the news feed update on Friday, October 23rd has caused more confusion than it has clarity. I honestly can’t figure out how it’s supposed to work (and I’ve read the general announcement).

I know that some people just hate change, and I promise that I’m not just another one of those naysayers. I generally welcome change when it improves the user experience and provides additional value; however, I think you’ll find that many of the site’s users will agree that the past two updates have accomplished neither. The site really does need a makeover, but until the company can bring in some experts in usability and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and get things back on track, I fear that future updates may continue to add complexity and subject users to further confusion.

Substandard Customer Service

Honestly, I’m not sure where Facebook finds its philosophy on customer service, but I would submit them as an example of bad customer service. I can cite at least two poor experiences in interacting with Facebook staff. The first concerns the aforementioned design changes. I participated heavily in the beta program and also spoke loudly regarding the design choices along with many others. I saw a couple changes take place as a result before public release, but still most of the suggestions from many testers were largely ignored (or at least it seemed that way). Facebook just knows better than its customer base? I can’t understand why any company would take this tactic.

The second instance of a poor experience was the result of a recent job fair at my graduate institution. Facebook brought representatives to the fair and I stopped by to inquire about possible internships and/or future employment. After chatting briefly with a representative, I left the booth with the distinct feeling that I was of no interest to them. We hadn’t even gotten into talking about job qualifications and employment openings. I was simply handed a 4×5 card with some information on it and cold shouldered to the side. Bad move, guys.

Perhaps Facebook should consider the company Comcast, who uses its Twitter account to interact with customers, smooth over any potential problems, and answer questions. It seems that Facebook is more interested in simply talking about itself than it is interacting with customers. They need to be proactive about getting involved and calming dissatisfied users. Sure, maybe we aren’t paying anything to use their service, but that is absolutely no excuse to provide substandard customer support. If you operate a business, you assume the responsibility of keeping your customers happy whether they pay you or not.

Final Thoughts

Facebook isn’t dead…yet. Nor, really, are there too many up and coming contenders to its social network dominance; however, take a close look at MySpace. Even though their website interface and userbase were completely awful (and you’d be hard pressed to find many who disagreed), they were the #1 social network for quite sometime…before Facebook, which even in its current state is far more usable than MySpace ever was, overtook them. Social Networking is here to stay, but if companies like Facebook aren’t careful, they’ll end up like the now defunct car brand, Saturn: old and obsolete.

The strongest buildings have the best foundations provided by the best architects and engineers. Facebook revolutionized the social networking industry, but I sense a structural weakness within the corporation. Only time will tell whether it’s a fixable problem, or whether the structure will simply collapse under its own weight.

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The Best Antivirus Protection: Common Sense

Posted by Matt in Browsers, General, Information, Social Networks, Web on October 4th, 2009

It’s been said that a little common sense goes a long way. I’d tend to agree, especially where your computer is concerned.

For years, most Windows-based computers have shipped with some sort of antivirus software preloaded–usually a 60 day trial of Norton or some other name-brand application. Some users will take the software as-is and either let their protection expire or pony up the $30-$40 for a full license after the trial period. Other users, perhaps those more experienced, will remove the preloaded antivirus and install their own favorite app. Various products include: McAffee, Kaspersky, Vipre, NOD32, AVG, and so on. Microsoft even has it’s own free security suite called Security Essentials. But the fact of the matter is: you may not even need antivirus!

Before you fall over in shock and disbelief, let me clarify that statement. A good antivirus suite is almost always better than none at all, but there are so many poor performers out there that you should make sure you use a product that won’t noticeably degrade your computer’s performance or take up valuable resources. Two I recommend checking out are Sunbelt’s Vipre and ESET’s NOD32. If you have a limited budget for malware protection, try AVG’s latest offering.

Back on topic, your best defense against the bad guys is a little common sense–whenever you’re using your computer. Follow these guidelines, and most likely, you can kiss that security suite goodbye for good!

  • Surf with a purpose: If you’re on the Internet just to mess around or pass the time, you’re probably not helping matters in the least. While watching videos on YouTube is innocuous enough, searching for “funny videos” on Google and clicking a random result could be disastrous. Many humor-related sites are loaded with spyware and adware just waiting to install themselves on an unsuspecting victim’s computer. Usually some sort of user-interaction is required for the install to complete, but not in all cases. While this is just one example of such a possibility, there are many other categories of sites known for their less-than-benevolent actions. Only visit sites you know and trust.
  • Secure your browser: If you’re still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, Firefox 3.0, Safari 3, or Chrome 1, your first task should be to upgrade your browser. Using a browser with known security flaws or outdated code can be one of the biggest security risks to your system. Whichever browser you choose, visit its vendor website for more information. For any browser, it’s smart to disable Java support since malware often uses Java to begin its installation. If you’re using Mozilla’s Firefox, install Adblock Plus to hide and disable nearly 100% of the advertisements you’d normally see.
  • Use caution with email, Facebook, and Twitter: Attacks based on a concept dubbed “social engineering” are becoming far more common. Emails, Facebook messages, Twitter updates, Instant Messages, and just about any other form of online communication may promise lucrative returns if you’ll just click a link, provide some personal information, or allow an application to access your profile. Be extremely wary of these types of messages. They’re almost always 100% fake and generally come prepared to hack your account, give someone remote control of your computer, or even steal your identity! Just delete or close the message and move on.
  • Avoid the suspicious: Ultimately, avoiding, or at least thoroughly researching anything suspicious looking will save you time, money, and big headaches down the road. Your motto should be: “If in doubt, don’t.” You’ll thank yourself later. Also, be a good web citizen by reporting spam to your ISP and letting social networks know when you spot suspicious activity on their site. You just might prevent someone else from triggering a disaster!

Finally, if you’re a Mac user, don’t assume you’re immune from attack. Any predator capable of hacking a Windows-based PC can do the same to an Apple OS X-based machine. The idea that you are invulnerable is a myth. Also, take the same level of care while social networking. Web Applications like Facebook don’t depend on your operating system and an attack is easy to stumble into on any platform.

Note: I am an expert in the computing industry and have been working sans antivirus protection for over 4 years without incident. Your computing safety is always your responsibility. Whether or not you run antivirus or antimalware software is your decision, but before attempting to do without, ensure you fully understand the risks and ramifications of doing so. I am not responsible for any damage you incur after reading this article. Proceed at your own risk!

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Facebook and Facial Recognition: An Obvious Marriage?

Posted by Matt in Social Networks on October 1st, 2009

The science of recognizing a face and the intelligence to recognize the same one twice. Or a million times. That’s one of 2009’s crowning technological achievements. Oh, sure, there have been facial recognition algorithms around for years, but up until this year, we haven’t had that feature on a mainstream consumer level. Within the past year, we’ve seen point-and-shoot digital cameras receive the ability to focus on individual faces in a frame and some of those cameras can even detect whether or not you’re smiling (and summarily refuse to snap the photo!). Standalone desktop applications like Apple iPhoto and Google Picasa will now scan your entire photo library for faces and once you’ve given the software some training, it’ll auto-detect and tag the mugs of family, friends, and maybe even your dog. In fact, Google’s online photo catalog software, Picasa Web Albums, has been doing the same thing for awhile as well. It’s a feature that makes cataloging photos much, much easier. No longer must you rely on finding an exact folder or using a non-smart desktop search tool to find the person you’re looking for. As long as you can remember their name, you can find their face.

For as long as most of us can remember, Facebook has allowed photo tagging. Upload your photos, click a cross-hair across a person’s face, and type in their name. If they’re using Facebook, it’ll link directly to their profile page and notify them that their face is now floating around the ‘net for any of their friends to see. A cool feature, very informative, and a stalker’s dream. But one thing that’s been bugging me for awhile is: why stop there?

Facebook, no doubt, has tens of petabytes worth of data stored across its servers and much of that is photo related. People upload terabytes worth of photos every day. Why isn’t Facebook using all that meta information to make your life easier? Imagine uploading 75 pictures of you and your friends from last week’s party. Facebook would then analyze each photo, tag everyone it recognizes from your friends list, and give you a confirmation page to adjust any of the tags. My guess is that the system wouldn’t even require training from the user as it could pull aggregate data from profile pictures and other tagged photos in order to make the whole process incredibly quick and easy. The question isn’t if they could do this, it’s why have they not?

Two reasons come immediately to mind, the first being that of privacy concerns. Suddenly you’ve turned Facebook into a huge searchable photo database that could make any law enforcement officer’s day by providing thousands of images and demographics of people not available in government or criminal databases. You’d also be presenting yourself as a target for some dangerous information leakage if Facebook were ever breached. This concern, I believe, is mostly without a logical base. Users continue to manually tag friends anyway and unless you disable the tagging system altogether, privacy will always be a concern.

The second potential issue is one of raw processing power. For instance, it took my beefy ThinkPad about 4 hours to sort through my collection of approximately 25,000 photos. That’s one dual core CPU’s near best effort since the average processor utilization was somewhere around 70%. I’m guessing Picasa was leaving some of the CPU free so that the machine didn’t slow to a complete crawl. Imagine then the billions of photos stored across Facebook servers. The company would need to create a system to process every single photo containing a face, match already associated tags, and create a massive database containing the results. This process would require not only a lot of time, but much additional storage space as well. Fortunately, storage is cheap these days–unfortunately the required number of extra CPUs and RAM modules are not.

As a side note, there was a Facebook Application released in the not-too-distant past allowing users to scan their photos for faces, but my guess is that without widespread use (and some major venture capital), the corresponding company and software didn’t get too far.

Ultimately, I think facial recognition is something that Facebook should and will eventually add to it’s service. My guess is that this feature is already in the works; however, Facebook usually holds close its cards until they’re ready for some sort of official release plan. Keep watching Facebook for any new information, and of course, you’ll find the details here as well when the announcement does arrive. My prediction? We’ll see something emerge by the end of 2010.

Cross your fingers…

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Real-time screen capture for free

Posted by Matt in Software on September 28th, 2009

Stumbled across this pretty sweet software product today while doing some research. CamStudio is a free, open-source (GPL licensed) screen capture application for Windows PCs. It can capture both audio and video simultaneously, allowing the user to record voice annotations along with the current action on the screen.

While CamStudio records everything in a proprietary codec, it is capable of exporting to both high-quality AVI and smaller Adobe Flash SWF files for web streaming purposes.

Their website is a little gimmicky looking and not incredibly easy to use, but scrolling halfway down the page will bring you to the product download links.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

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Why we need multiple web browsers

Posted by Matt in Browsers, Web on September 26th, 2009

Ask any ten different people what their favorite browser is and it’s possible you might possibly end up with ten completely different opinions. That’s because these days browsers are a dime a dozen and it’s mostly up to the consumer which browser he or she uses. Major players in today’s market include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. With the exception of Internet Explorer, all of these browsers are more or less available for any OS you use. But which one is the right browser? Which is the best? That question has become the object of many a debate and a post like this can’t settle it once and for all–especially with the daily changing face of technology. But although some web developers (designers especially) would like to have only one global browser (or at least force all browsers to use the same rendering engine), there is actually good reason in having a diverse market.

The hating of Internet Explorer

There’s no question that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser on the market at this time. Between the number of users surfing with version 6, 7, or 8, well over 50% of the world is still IE-centric. Yet you’ll find developers, designers, and consumers have developed the widespread opinion that Internet Explorer is bad. Period. This, simply, is not true.

Back when Internet Explorer 6 was released with Windows XP in 2001, it really began to change the face of the Internet itself. We started to see a lot more plugins being written to make websites more “dynamic.” Broadband connections were seriously beginning to take off and the phenomenon we now know as Google was setting the stage to become one of the Internet’s dominating forces. IE6 was compliant with HTML4 web standards, made possible the widespread use of CSS, and was fast and light. As an integral part of the Windows operating system, it took full advantage of certain performance enhancements. IE6, as much as it is despised now for it’s lack of HTML standards support, is really partially responsible for getting us where we are today. Versions 7 and 8 may have been Microsoft’s catch-up game, but as far as standards-compliant browsers go, things have come a long way since 2001.

Enter Firefox

The next major market player was officially introduced in 2005 by Mozilla, creator of Firefox’s ancestors Mozilla Suite and Netscape. Version 1.0 was slow to catch on outside the developer community, but many saw it as a good future competitor to Microsoft’s browser market domination. Firefox re-defined the way we use the Internet by successfully introducing tabbed-browsing for the first time. Some would correctly argue that Opera was the first to implement this feature, but Opera’s failure to capture significant market-share makes Firefox tabbed-browsing’s rightful ancestor. Version 2.0 saw a small spike in usage and by the time version 3.0 arrived in mid-2008, Firefox had gained significant hold on over 30% of Internet users. Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine and has been influential in setting the bar for browsers being standards compliant.

Webkit: Safari and Chrome

Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome are even more recent additions to the browser community. Together they have further upped the ante for browser competition. Until Safari 3.0 was released, the browser was pretty unsuccessful. All but the most loyal Mac users immediately downloaded Firefox upon getting a new computer. Version 3.0 was the first truly successful implementation of Safari as a mainstream browser and version 4.0 may receive relatively equal use to Firefox on the OS X platform. As a competitor to other browsers on the Microsoft Windows platform, Safari has largely failed to capture any sort of audience.

The other Webkit-equipped browser is Google Chrome. It’s announcement was a surprise to many and it’s subsequent popularity has been an even greater shock. (I’m actually using Chrome to write this post). It remains to be seen if the trend will continue, especially as Google prepares to release their own Chrome-based operating system. Safari and Chrome contain very similar feature sets.

The Webkit and Mozilla Gecko 1.9 rendering engines are two of the first to officially support a preliminary implementation of CSS3 attributes. While Microsoft has been playing catch-up, Apple, Google, and Mozilla have been pushing the envelope by rewriting their Javascript engines, introducing new browser features, and preparing to support future Internet standards. In fact, Firefox 3.5 is the first browser to support HTML 5. It includes powerful new architecture to support native HTML 5 video and local persistent storage for web applications.

We can see from the history of these various browsers that innovation drives the web. The W3C will often ratify new standards based on implementations completed by browser vendors–especially if a feature is supported across multiple browsers. We can only hope that the market-share will continue to even out as it has done up to this point. With each manufacturer seeking to bring new features to market before its competitors, we will continue to use innovative technologies in our daily online routines.

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