On the positivity of Facebook and the disadvantages of social services

Have you ever wondered what a typical web user needs today, that he would be a regular visitor to your site? What would he gladly, day after day, return to the site, open the link by link, invite his friends there, publish personal information and photos there, etc. etc. I thought and matured to one simple thought, which I will try to explain below using the example of Facebook.com .

Once upon a time with friends, I expressed my discontent with the topic of “minus” posts and comments on social sites like youtube.com , habrahabr.ru and sites where the system for regulating the quality and adequacy of posts and comments is reserved for users. Even then, I expressed my assumption that, rather, the minus buttons would start disappearing from sites, only “pluses” would remain. Actually, over time, and it turned out at Facebook with their Like Button (I like). Now these buttons are a little less than everywhere else.
After all, if you think about it, this is an ideal model for regulating the quality of publication - we will never be offended and angry that our post has not been given the proper amount of pluses / likes, but it is objectively clear that if a post / link / photo has a lot of them, this means really worth the attention. The minus of the minuses (sorry for the pun) is that it can cause a negative reaction from the visitor and will repel from further activity.

Another, no less relevant problem in its time arose between blogs and twitter (and still remains in some places). On the one hand, such services are livejournal.com , tumblr.com , etc., where a short post (a few dozen words) against the rest looks too short, which makes the user uncomfortable. On the other, twitter.com , where you are generally severely limited to 140 characters in length (status), which generally seems like a harsh and unreasonable act. Wise Facebook chose a middle ground, having thought through the desires of both. That a short status in a few words, a link, a picture, a video on YouTube, a long post - everything looks quite harmonious and user-friendly. It is also not unimportant on Facebook that the fact that it is not necessary to remove a person from the list of friends if his posts attacked your tape, as you have to do in livejournal and twitter, you just have to block the display of publications in your feed that will satisfy you and the person who may never know about it.
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And of course, a convenient, intuitive design, speed of work with the site, the absence of unpredictable situations, "glitches" and errors on the site - all this directly affects the reaction of users. With the advent of pages on Facebook (Pages), many of the largest sites suffered losses in attendance (and therefore profits), such as MySpace.com : musicians, DJs and, of course, still create their pages there, but just to keep up with everyone, but the activity of the fans has become much lower than before. And the blame for the inconvenience and heaviness of MySpace, which, again, causes a negative for the user, who sits and waits until his browser renders the musician's page. And the visual design in facebook has now also become possible due to the appearance of custom blocks with html markup ( example 1 , example 2 and example 3 ).

Predicting the future, I suppose that soon the quick message managers (ICQ, MSN, etc.) will become a thing of the past with the advent of the online chat in facebook. Already, most of the IM clients for PCs and mobile devices have rushed to support open Facebook protocols for sending fast messages. Just think how many operations with the current ICQ / AOL policy you need to perform in order for two people to exchange messages with each other: authorize each other, allow them to add themselves, add to the contact list, add to the list of seers, and so on. In Facebook, it’s enough just to add as a friend, where, among other things, you can always see the actual information about the user; Do not forget about the powerful anti-spam system. During the two years of my stay there, no bastard, no one tried to draw my attention to the advertised product dishonestly, spamming.

Summarizing what was written above: the secret of Facebook's success (and of any other site) in the absence of negativity in working with it. If each developer puts himself in the visitor’s place and thinks “what I may not like here,” then we, like Leonardo da Vinci, cutting off the excess, will come to improving our results.

Thanks for attention.