We’re at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. It’s cold and rainy, but we’re happy to be here, interacting with a whole lot of people who share our enthusiasm for the social web.
This morning, I attended a session where Dave Morin of Facebook talked about Facebook’s vision for the social web (video here). For me, the most interesting aspect of what he said was the emphasis on bringing not just all the people but all the things people care about into Facebook. That’s what we’re about at iFavr (Facebook to begin with, other platforms to follow), so naturally, I was very interested in what Facebook’s people think about it.
Judging from Dave’s talk, Facebook’s vision centers on what used to be called Pages and are now being called Public Profiles. The general idea is that when you like something, you visit its profile and become a fan. The fact that you’re a fan will then appear in your own profile, you’ll see posts from whatever it is in what used to be called your News Feed and will now be called your Stream, and maybe some other things - these revamped Pages/Public Profiles were announced just last week, and I’m not sure I completely understand them yet. (Showing Pages you’ve fanned in your profile is old, whereas posting from Public Profiles to your Stream is new.)
As usual when Facebook changes something, the reactions of users to the profile-ization of Pages haven’t been a love fest. (Check the comments on Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of the change, linked above.) We don’t mean to join the pile-on, but here are three of several reasons why Tonya and I think Facebook’s approach leaves plenty of room for iFavr and other alternatives.
First, obviously, many things people care about don’t have Public Profiles and won’t for a long time, if ever. You can’t become a fan of something that doesn’t have a profile.
Second, there’s no support for searching or filtering the things a person has fanned - they’re just piled at the bottom of the Info tab. So I can’t easily find my friend Jenny’s favorite places to spend time in Atlanta (her home town), and my friends can’t easily find my favorite places to eat in Wilmington, NC (there are several), even if these places actually have Public Profiles, Jenny and I have located them, and we’ve become fans.
Third, the whole scheme is too top-down for some people’s comfort. This is fuzzier than the first two issues but not necessarily any less important. Public Profiles are initiated and controlled by the entities they represent, and even though some posts related to them in your Stream will reflect your friends’ activities, there’s a kind of hierarchy about the arrangement that some people will find objectionable. It may be fine with some users for some things, but for many others, a more user-centered approach would be preferable.
iFavr has none of these drawbacks. You can favrite whatever you like, regardless of whether anyone else has already done so. Favrites are richly searchable and browsable by keywords, tags, and favriters. And it’s all user driven. (Favrited entities may eventually become active participants in iFavr, but if so, it will be in ways that don’t compromise the primacy of favriters.)