Every now and then, someone on the Facebook team gives us another reminder that users are not their primary customers. Tuesday, it was project manager Austin Haugen’s turn when he announced a landmark for third party timeline apps.
Some of the most innovative companies are launching new timeline apps this week at SXSW in Austin, Texas. New apps from Foursquare, Nike, The Onion, VEVO, Fandango, Viddy, Endomondo, and RootMusic give people more ways to add their location, fitness, video and media interests to their timeline and share what they love with friends.
In the past two months, nearly 3,000 timeline apps have launched. These startups are seeing increased engagement and growth:
- Pinterest grew its daily active Facebook user base by 60%.
- Goodreads increased daily traffic by 77%.
- Pose saw 5X growth in signups on its website and mobile app.
Facebook is spinning this admittedly impressive news as a boon for users, but the real winners are Pinterest, The Onion, Yahoo! News, and all the other app developers. What could be better for them than to remove any content filter and make sharing their content literally effortless?
Back in the early days of social media, users had to get a link and return to Facebook to share it. Then the company came out with their Share button, which took out most of the work. After that came the Like button, making it a one-click affair that didn’t take users off of a company’s website. Can’t get much easier than that, right? Wrong. With Facebook’s increasingly common timeline apps, it’s like all your Facebook friends are looking over your shoulder on news sites, secondary social networks, and more.
In the beginning, it was about making it easier for users to aggregate quality content on Facebook that they thought was important, with the needs of website owners and their advertisers left to chance. Over the last few years, that hierarchy has slowly turned upside down, until now Facebook’s primary objective is about making it easier for website owners to get their product and, more to the point, their advertisements in front of more eyeballs, while the needs of users have been left twisting in the wind.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I really don’t like the idea of getting hit with a barrage of every Yahoo! News story my friends are reading. The problem is that these apps are an all-or-nothing deal. I could choose not to connect to their app, but if I do that, the app doesn’t allow me to click through to the story. Instead, I’m forced to do a search for the headline, which by the way, Facebook and Yahoo!, sends me right into Google’s arms. I could turn off Yahoo!’s app altogether (In fact, I finally did get tired of sifting through the flotsam and turned it off last month.), but then I lose the insight of interesting stories that friends would have shared but didn’t because the app was doing it for them.
Let’s look at another example. Until yesterday, Facebook’s social sidebar widget on The Onion was a useful tool, as it told me which stories my friends recently shared. My friends know what’s funny, so it was nice to be able to keep track of the shares I missed on Facebook. But now that The Onion has made the switch to their new app, that list in the sidebar has been replaced with one that tracks not every story my Facebook friends found interesting and relevant enough to share, but every story they read — even the bad ones. That’s not designed to help me or my friends; rather, it’s been built to increase The Onion’s ad revenue by mixing the good content that my friends would share with the bad content that they wouldn’t have bothered me with.
The biggest hurdle to traffic through social media has always been getting people to click that share button. Facebook has made it so companies don’t even need engaging, quality content to gain traffic and revenues. All they need is a name and a Facebook app, and that lack of need will soon drag down content quality even while revenue increases. Remember that fact, especially next time they peddle site “improvements” that actually detract from your user experience.
Yeah, I’ve found myself clicking on links to interesting stories only to be confronted with the “Allow app access” dialogue box. Well, no thank you, I wasn’t that interested in the story that I’m going to give you access to my information!
Give me a break. Bleh.