Facebook Connect & Interaction Utility

I just finished watching the hour long video of PSFK’s “Good Ideas in Digital” discussion panel. If you have a spare hour and are interested in advertising, design and/or marketing in the digital realm, it is time well spent. Piers Fawkes moderated the panel discussion between Claire Hyland, Johanna Beyenbach, Mike Arauz and Noah Brier. In it they discussed a broad range of topics including issues related to online identity and Facebook’s new Connect service. While listening to the discussion, I was compelled to jot down some notes and ideas, which I thought I would share here.

One of the subjects discussed was Facebook Connect, which began rolling out this week. For those of you who haven’t heard of Connect, it is a service that allows Facebook users to sign into outside sites using their Facebook ID. This would allow them to share their activities outside Facebook with their friends, if they so choose. It is very similar to their earlier failed Beacon effort, which has since been removed after negative reaction from users concerned with privacy issues. With Connect, Facebook is hoping to tweak the idea of Beacon by expanding it and concentrating on privacy concerns. The hope is that by encouraging users to share more information, Facebook can create more targeted advertising for their own site and affiliates.

I have mixed feelings about the idea of Facebook Connect. On the one hand, the service is headed in the direction that OpenID and OpenSocial hint towards, where everyone has a single online identity that they can take all over the web. However, I think their motivation is flawed. As the New York Times mentions in their overview, “just 57 percent of all users of social networks clicked on an ad in the last year, and only 11 percent of those clicks led to a purchase, IDC said. And it turns out that marketers are not so interested in advertising on pages filled with personal trivia and relationship updates.” Advertising is driving the web at the moment, but I don’t think it will remain at the top for long, or at least not in its current form. Reading the comments in Noah Bier’s post on the subject, Ryan Catbird makes a good point about the future of digital advertising, “The position you want to be in is sitting WITH the people and their friends, not BETWEEN them.” Facebook needs to understand that people aren’t responding to traditional advertising, as the above IDC study clearly shows. People want utility from digital products and service, which opens a stream of business models not based on advertising.

Expanding on the idea of digital utility, I began thinking about it in the analogue, offline sense. Before the Internet or e-mail, we had a plethora of ways to interact. Technologies such as the telephone or letter writing each have their own unique utility value. Going back even further, smoke signals served as a technology to send messages from a distance. As time has advanced, technologies have evolved to allow communication at progressively richer levels, bringing us closer to in person, one-on-one communication. In a sense, communication in the analogue world is only limited by the constraints of technology. this is still true in the digital world.

Even if we want the digital world to be the most uninhibited flow of interaction possible, technology imposes its constraints. As I see it, the Internet has actually created bigger constraints than in the analogue world. For instance, if I wanted to tell a friend about something before the Internet, I simply had to write them a letter and send it to them. The most apparent constraint to this would be the presence of an address to send the letter to, The same holds true on the Internet, but having somewhere to send the letter is no longer such a given. For example, if I used twitter, the recipient would also need to use twitter and if I wrote an email the recipient would need an email address for me to send it to. My somewhat convoluted point is that the web has fragmented communication to a new extreme. In the old days, the pervasiveness of the postal service provided a higher level of utility than online communication services like twitter. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The beauty of digital content is that everything is just a combination of 1’s and 0’s: the digital world is an information democracy. In this case, a twitter message can be boiled down to a string of digits just like a youtube clip can and a blog post can too. However despite the commonality between all this information the constraints imposed by the technologies prevent them from interacting. While this may sound naïve, this is true at a basic level. Projects like OpenID and OpenSocial are trying to change this and make all information able to be translated back and forth, providing new utility. In this sense, these services are returning us to a world where it didn’t matter what instant messaging client you used: a message was a message. I would categorize this utility as a form of “virtual reality”. As Noah Brier mentioned in the panel discussion, the “virtual reality” aspect the Wiimote allows users to interact with games more naturally. This obliterates the constraints of previous technologies and brings us closer to the interaction we seek. As Mike Arauz pointed out near the end of the discussion, we aren’t becoming more like computers, computers are becoming more like us. As a designer, this validates the ideas of user-centred design, proving that technology is best utilized to enhance our behaviours not create new ones.