Facebook Uses Consumer Feedback To Adapt

Last week, Facebook did something it had been urged not to: listen to its customers.

At the end of last week, Facebook partially rolled back a redesign to its home page newsfeed that had been introduced late last winter. Before March 2009, the Facebook home page presented highlights from a user's friends who were of greatest interest, deduced based on their history browsing Facebook. This was changed into a news feed made up mainly of status updates in real time, which gave the site a Twitter-like feel.

While many users took to the revised interface, complaints were loud and furious. Julia Angwin (author of Stealing MySpace, a book about how Facebook dethroned its rival), and even Facebook employees noted the newsfeed was now unmanageable, dominated by their most annoyingly vocal friends (who often stream their Twitter updates into their Facebook status).

With Facebook under pressure to show revenue and profit, brands were given a comfortable seat at that table, adding to many users' feeling the site had become too spam-heavy.

But Facebook had been admonished to ignore the negative feedback, notably by prominent industry blogger Robert Scoble, who titled a March 21 entry "Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now."

...all those who are saying the new design sucks should NOT be listened to. Yeah, I know a lot of people are going to get mad at me for saying that. After all, how can a blogger say to not listen to the masses? Easy: I’ve seen the advice the masses are giving and most of it isn’t very good for Facebook’s business interests.

When [Facebook's 25-year-old CEO Mark] Zuckerberg announced these changes a couple of weeks ago I told him he was brilliant and that his moves this month would be remembered for decades. Decades.

It seemed Facebook saw things similarly, as they pointed to past instances where their changes (such as the newsfeed itself) had been initially resisted but then embraced. But negative press -- like a NY Times article suggesting Facebook is facing a user exodus -- and perhaps user data (unavailable to us) led the company to shift gears. Last week, the company relented, changing its homepage to give users the option to toggle between a default "highlights" page (like the pre-March homepage) and the more recent real-time newsfeed.

So was Facebook smart to listen to its users, or not? Will offering more flexibility keep Facebook from suffering the decline of once-dominant social networks Friendster and MySpace?