2014-04-20

Facebook is poisoning itself

My FB feed is getting more and more polluted with "shared" links to "news media" "articles" that already have lots of eyeball juice, and the communicate almost nothing beyond the sharer's own confirmation bias.

Original content textual posts, and links to pictures and other personal media, about what my friends and contacts are actually doing in their own personal life, are now almost entirely crowded out. Also crowded out are posts by businesses and organizations that I've followed (now called "Liked").

The payoff of the personal time investment into Facebook is declining severely.

My own workflow for FB now is to individually select the feeds of half a dozen people I'm most interested in and read them. Which, hilariously, is the *original* FB workflow, back when it was .edu only, before they came up with the "unified feed wall".


2014-04-07

Iterative cost reduction causes collapse of UX quality

One can always keep shaving cost by 5% each iteration, each time yielding with a 10% drop in quality of user experience.
That's not impressive at all, and continuing in that course will eventually kill your company.
What is instead impressive and profitable is spending 10x the money, and using those resources to get 100x the UX quality.
That is one of the lessons of the iPhone.