{"id":15019,"date":"2019-05-02T20:16:23","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T20:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/facebook-pivots-to-what-it-wishes-it-was.html"},"modified":"2019-05-02T20:16:23","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T20:16:23","slug":"facebook-pivots-to-what-it-wishes-it-was","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/facebook-pivots-to-what-it-wishes-it-was.html","title":{"rendered":"Facebook pivots to what it wishes it was"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Facebook\u2019s dreams<\/span>, it\u2019s a clean and private place. People spend their time having thoughtful discussions in \u201cmeaningful\u201d Groups, planning offline meetups with Events or laughing together in a Facebook <\/a> Watch party.<\/p>\n

In reality, Facebook is a cluttered mess of features that seem to constantly leak user data. People waste their time viewing inane News Feed posts from \u201cfriends\u201d they never talk to, enviously stalking through photos of peers or chowing on click-bait articles and viral videos in isolation. Facebook will never shake this reputation if it just keeps polishing its old features.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Facebook is rolling out what could be called an \u201caspirational redesign\u201d known as FB5. Rather than polishing what Facebook was, it tries to spotlight what it wants to be. \u201cThis is the biggest change we\u2019ve made to the Facebook app and site in five years,\u201d CEO Mark Zuckerberg <\/a> said to open Facebook\u2019s F8 conference yesterday.<\/p>\n

The new Facebook<\/h2>\n

Most noticeably, that starts with sucking much of the blue out of the Facebook interface, making it look sparse and calming \u2014 despite a More button that unveils the social network\u2019s bloat into dozens of rarely used features. A new logo features a brighter blue bubble around Facebook\u2019s distinctive white f, which attempts to put a more uplifting spin on a bruised brand.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Functionally, FB5 means placing Groups near the center of a freshly tabbed interface for both Facebook\u2019s website and app, and putting suggestions for new ones to join across the service. \u201cEverywhere there are friends, there should be Groups,\u201d says the head of the Facebook app, Fidji Simo. Groups already has 1 billion monthly users, so Facebook is following the behavior pattern and doubling down. But Facebook\u2019s goal is not only to have 2.38 billion people using the feature \u2014 the same number as use its whole app \u2014 but to get them all into meaningful Groups that emblematize their identity. Indeed, 400 million already are. And now Groups for specific interests like gaming or health support will get special features, and power users will get a dashboard of updates across all their communities.<\/p>\n

Groups will be flanked by Marketplace, perhaps the Facebook feature with the most latent potential. It\u2019s a rapidly emerging use case Facebook wants to fuel. Just a year and a half after launch, Marketplace had 800 million monthly users. Zuckerberg took Craigslist, added real identity to thwart bad behavior and now is bolting it to the navigation bar of the most-used app on earth. The result is a place where it\u2019s easy to put things up for sale and get tons of viewers. I once sold a couch on Marketplace in 20 minutes. Now sellers can take payments directly in the app instead of with cash or Venmo, and they can offer to ship items anywhere at the buyer\u2019s expense. By following Zuckerberg\u2019s mandate that 2019 focus on commerce, Facebook has become a viable Shopify competitor.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If Groups is what\u2019s already working about Facebook\u2019s future, Watch is the opposite. It\u2019s a product designed to capture the video viewing bonanza Facebook observes on Netflix and YouTube. But without tentpole content like a \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d or \u201cStranger Things,\u201d it\u2019s failed to impact the cultural zeitgeist. The closest thing it has to must-see video is Buffy the Vampire Slayer re-runs and a docu-series on NBA star Steph Curry. Facebook claims 75 million people now Watch for at least one minute per day, though those 60 seconds don\u2019t have to be sequential. That\u2019s still just 4 percent of its users. And a Diffusion study found 50 percent of adult U.S. Facebook users had never even heard of Watch. Sticking it front and center demonstrates Facebook\u2019s commitment to making Watch a hit, even if it has to cram it down our throats.<\/p>\n

Not the old Facebook<\/h2>\n

The products of the past got little love onstage at F8. Nothing new for News Feed, Facebook\u2019s mint but also the source of its misinformation woes. In the age of Snapchat and Zuckerberg\u2019s newfound insistence on ephemerality to prevent embarrassment, the Timeline profile chronicling your whole Facebook life got nary a mention. And Pages for businesses that were the center of its monetization strategy years ago didn\u2019t find space in the keynote, similar to how they\u2019ve been butted out of the News Feed by competition and Facebook\u2019s philosophical shift from public content to friends and family.<\/p>\n

The one thing we heard a lot about but didn\u2019t actually see much of was privacy. Zuckerberg started the conference declaring \u201cThe future is private!\u201d He spoke about how Facebook plans to make its messaging apps encrypted, how it wants to be a living room rather than just a town hall and how it\u2019s following the shift in user behavior away from broadcasting. But we didn\u2019t see any new privacy protections for the developer platform, a replacement for its chief security officer that\u2019s been vacant for nine months or the Clear History feature Zuckerberg announced last year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cI get that a lot of people aren\u2019t sure that we\u2019re serious about this. I know that we don\u2019t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,\u201d Zuckerberg joked, without seeming to generate a single laugh. Combined with having little to show to enhance privacy, making fun of such a dire situation doesn\u2019t instill much confidence. When Zuckerberg does take things seriously, it quickly manifests itself in the product, like with Facebook\u2019s 2012 shift to mobile, or in the company, like with 2018\u2019s doubling of security headcount. He knew mobile and content moderation failures could kill his network. But does someone who told Time magazine<\/a> in 2010 that \u201cWhat people want isn\u2019t complete privacy\u201d truly see a loose stance on privacy as an existential threat?<\/p>\n

Interoperable, encrypted messaging will boost privacy, but it\u2019s also just good business logic given Zuckerberg\u2019s intention to own chat \u2014 the heart of your phone. Facebook\u2019s creepiness stems from it sucking in data to power ad targeting. Nothing new was announced to address that. Despite his words, perhaps Zuckerberg doesn\u2019t aspire to make Facebook as private as he aspired to make it mobile and secure.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Wired reported that Zuckerberg authored a strategy book given to all employees ahead of the IPO that noted \u201cIf we don\u2019t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.\u201d But F8 offered a new interpretation. Maybe given the lack of direct competitors in its league, and the absence of a mass exodus over its constant privacy scandals, it was the outdated product itself that was killing Facebook. The permanent Facebook. The all-you-do-is-scroll Facebook. The bored-of-my-friends Facebook. Users were being neglected rather than pushed away or stolen. By ignoring the past and emphasizing the products it aspires to have dominate tomorrow \u2014 Groups, Marketplace, Watch \u2014 Facebook can start to unchain itself from the toxic brand poisoning its potential.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/_Tce1b7VcXs\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Facebook\u2019s dreams, it\u2019s a clean and private place. People spend their time having thoughtful discussions in \u201cmeaningful\u201d Groups, planning offline meetups with Events or laughing together in a Facebook <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-15019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t