Chattanooga Pulse

By now, either you or someone you know is part of Facebook.  And judging from the demographics, chances are a whole of lot of your friends are on the social networking site even if you haven’t joined yet.  U.S. membership is estimated to exceed 65 million people, with women outnumbering men (a bit of a surprise considering men traditionally use the Internet far more often than women).

But the real change to Facebook, which started life as a site solely for college students, has been how the age demographics have changed in just the past year.  While 18-24 year olds still make up nearly 40 percent of the users, those 35 and over have flocked to the site at staggering growth of 276 percent in the past six months, representing 17 percent of the userbase.  Combine that with the 27 percent of people between 25 and 35, and college kids are now outnumbered 42 to 40 percent.

Which has presented a real challenge to how Facebook programmers, as they deal with the change in how people use the site.  Earlier in the year, the site was overhauled to make it more like the also-very-popular Twitter, a change that created a lot of very public consternation.  Yet within a month or so, not only had the changes been accepted, but they had become very popular.  Being able to share your thoughts, your favorite webs ites and videos as well as photos of just about anything truly defined the “social” in social interaction.

But apparently unable to leave well enough alone (the mantra, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is apparently unknown within Facebook’s development team), the most recent changes to the site have not only been roundly criticized, but have done something much more detrimental to the site—they’ve made the social aspect much more difficult.

Instead of having one home page to see the things that interest you, now you basically have an all-or-nothing choice; you can see just the “status updates” or your friends (but not the videos, web links, photos, etc.) or you can see every single thing your friends do, from who they’ve become friends with to their latest exploits in Mafia Wars of Farmville.  This all-or-nothing approach has angered many who had become used to the cafeteria approach of picking just what they wanted to see.

Making matters far worse, though, is a habit that Facebook developers have had from the very beginning of the web site: an unwillingness to openly communicate with users.  The changes were made without any announcement or explanation.  The cries of frustrated users have been met with silence, nor has there been any attempt to communicate directly with users.  They could learn a lesson from MySpace, where “Tom” sends out e-mail updates about every change.

Whether or not Facebook will eventually respond to the literally tens of millions of complaints from users who at least want more control over what they are forced to view, if not an outright return to the previous system, remains to be seen.  And if you wonder why a “simple” web site is that important, consider that even at 65 million members, the site is still growing at a rate of 59 percent this year.  Fairly soon, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that a Facebook account will be as common as an e-mail account—and just as important.