A long time ago, I was a huge Myspace fan. It was miles ahead of Friendster and LiveJournal, providing a place to connect with a lot of friends, share photos, and meet new people around interests. Then, as we all know, the site became riddled with animated GIFs for backgrounds, very little serious conversation (unless you count setting up your next hookup “serious conversation”) and Facebook took advantage of lowering IQ of the overall MySpace population with its introduction of a clean, simple, and less in-your-face hookup planning UI.

Myspace never figured out how to compete with Facebook. In the midst of all of this, it was purchased by News Corporation, and it appeared it might be revamped and saved, but the site’s loyal users were adamant about the sanctity of their blinking, clashing, boobs everywhere web 2.0 hangout. The years went by and Myspace’s glow of adolescent decollage faded, its musicians kept profiles but found better places to share their music, and traffic dropped off. In November 2012, Myspace was ranked 233rd by total web traffic. Not terrible, but certainly not the site that once held the promise to grow to the most-visited site on the Internet. In 2011, News Corporation sold Myspace for $35M (down from that $580M that they paid for it a few years earlier), to the advertising network Specific Media and Justin Timberlake. It isn’t surprising that the company now wants to return to its music discovery roots.

What Should We Do With Our Punk Kid That Can’t Get a Job?

Ok, so naturally a site that still has a sizable amount of traffic, but is losing users by the day, is going to do something substantial to turn its business around. For Myspace, that either meant attempting to copy Facebook (and setting itself up for lawsuits for infringing on all their social networking patents), or doing something different. So Myspace execs decided the one area they could get right that Facebook isn’t all over is mobile. They redesigned the site once again, this time – supposedly – to be ideally set up for tablet users. To be fair, I haven’t tried the site on a tablet yet (I don’t actually own one.) But the web experience leaves much to be desired.

Myspace also wants to be a media discovery site, bringing it back to its original roots as a place to fan musicians and learn about new artists. It appears to be trading in a more traditional social network style design with a user experience where you can “add people or media” you like to your “library.”

The initial browsing experience left me rather confused. Only my experience as a loyal user of both Spotify and Twitter gave me some foundation for what this site is trying to do. They want to be Spotify – a music discovery service – but bigger, to compete against Spotify and the other music discovery apps. And with video discovery. And editorial content that is really challenging to browse on a computer.

What is Myspace’s secret sauce?

While at first glance, it looks like they’re banking on exclusive content and celebrities, it appears the big opportunity for Myspace is getting social media discovery and sharing right, while focusing equally on the web experience and the mobile experience. The way the site looks right now (at least on the web), I wouldn’t put my money on a lot of success, but that could change. There is definitely room for music and media discovery, especially as the smartphone and tablet market continue to grow.

The concept here, which takes a while to figure out, is that every person is a curator of content. They are betting on status as a way to encourage people to share, without any real gamification features enabled to highlight contributions. It isn’t clear how one can gain followers here, instead the experience is really about the musicians/creatives and their fanbase. Still, everyday users such as myself can post status updates (how could the site even call itself social without a status update box?) But they aren’t looking for any old “what are you doing” or “what’s happening” status update – they are looking for media-centric posts to help curate the content and provide valuable data that I’m betting will be used later for recommendations and eventually for targeted advertising. Like Facebook, you can add a photo and location with your status update, but you can also easily add a song. How often do you want to share a song with your status update?

And I…..eeeeeee…. I …. will always love you

Great, I can share a song with my status post. That may lure musically inclined types to Myspace, but not enough to lure them away from Facebook.

What’s interesting is that Myspace appears to be going after a mix of hipsters and the younger generations who have shunned Facebook. The people who are not interested in sharing their latest personal status updates, or seeing the 2000000th picture of their classmate’s baby. And they assume these people have the attention spans for a Twitter-like experience but want it to have more pictures and look really nice on their tablets. (OMG it has HORIZONTAL SCROLLING on the web and it can go on forever and ever and ever and ever… just keep scrolling down for it to scroll left… gah this is making me dizzy.)

So, in short, new Myspace is what I’ve been saying Spotify should be for a long time, with a terrible UI for web. If I wasn’t already using Spotify, I may be drawn to the fact that, for now at least, I can access a giant library of music for free (I’m guessing they will have to start charging at some point.) But the UI for web is uncomfortable to say the least. I’m sure they’d argue that their new audience is going to come from mobile and no one uses the web anymore (I mean, come on, I should just be grateful they didn’t design the entire site to process only via the chip that the cool kids have implanted in their brains) but to gain mass adoption, the web user experience needs some help. Also, they could learn a thing or two from Spotify and how their app enables users to sort music, versus add to a generic library. Granted, I’ve been invited to the pre- pre- launch, so who knows what is up those Myspacers’ sleeves.

What you really have here is a company that is trying to build the world’s largest social/crowdsourced recommendation engine for media… curated by editorial staff (see below) and everyday people who share similar taste in music, videos, and other content. There is a need for a company to get this right, so Myspace has a shot. It just is trying too hard to be cool, and in the process has made the site really hard to use.

Even on sign up, the experience is confusing. Most people who sign up are going to not be musicians or artists. Most people are going to be fans. So, ideally, you’d make being a fan seem less uncool in the UI. You’d basically check that off for everyone because even artists are fans. Then you’d provide an option to be a content creator as well. Unless the site is no longer for the fans, which I think defeats the point of a media discovery application.

But hey, at least they have music and videos for old ladies like myself in their database…

While I love the concept of connecting people through contextual data — both on location and interests — the challenge remains that putting two people in front of each other, even with a shared interest, is not much of a conversation starter. I don’t love how I look on camera, and I wasn’t sure what I’d get on Airtime, so I clicked through ten live users who apparently shared things in common with me — and I cheated, I put my finger over my camera so no one actually knew there was a female on the other end. Nor would they be too excited given the current state of my hair, but I digress.

Surprise, surprise, as I clicked through 10 random live Airtimers, they were all men. No close-up cock shots, so that’s already a plus. However, I just didn’t know what to say to people, even if I were being myself. Instead of Chatroulette, where it was pretty much accepted that people were ADHD browsing and clicking next when they got bored, suddenly you were connected with someone who you are actually connected to (through friends or interests) somehow. For example, I ran into a person who worked at the same publication I previously reported for (I didn’t know him) and considered saying hi, but my social anxiety ended up being worse on cam than it would be in person. What would I say? Would we just joke about how awkward Airtime is? Would we discuss how we’re both researching for our respective blogs? How would I end the conversation?

One cool feature is how the browser starts to display likes you have in common the longer you stay connected with that person, so if you have a lot of things in common it rolls those out slowly providing new topics of conversation. I didn’t stay logged in long enough to see if I had thousands of common interests with anyone — I just clicked next until my thumb covering the cam got tired, and I signed off. I couldn’t find a stop cam button, so I had to shut down the browser.

Perhaps others are less nervous about meeting random people online — on live video — who share similar interests and have other even more relevant contextual connections, but it sure made me nervous. And given that I did not see one other female on there, it seems like until Airtime and its competitors figure out how to solve the awkward problem, they are going to have a whole lot of Chatroulette 2.0 on their hands.

That said, the Contextual Web is really the next generation of the web (mobile is just a piece of that, it’s data-driven context that matters.) Airtime could be less creepy, and more useful, if it created hangouts (more than 2 people at a time) focused on live events (ie The Olympics.) Yes, this brings us back to the days of “A/S/L cam?” but Google Hangouts have rekindled the whole chatroom non-orgy concept and made them somewhat cool again, or at least showing signs of potential. But, I’m not sure people want to go online to have live video conversations with people who share their “interests.”

About a year ago, I thought about how neat it would be to make Foursquare more about introducing you to people who are actually around you, versus encouraging you to check into locations. The Foursquare app itself shows other people that have recently checked into the same location, but there was no effort to connect you to that person. You just saw their face and name, and it was all the more creepy to wander around the bar/restaurant/club in dim lighting trying to figure out who your fellow nerd was, and having to actually strike up a conversation to figure out if they had anything in common with you.

Highlight has changed all that. It lets people opt into allowing others to be pinged when they are nearby, and just as my app concept detailed a year ago, they use Facebook interests and friends to let you know if you happen to have anything in common with the person. This makes for a great conversation starter if you are at a bar or club (though I haven’t tried it out in that setting yet.) It also makes for a quite interesting experience as you go about your regular day-to-day routine.

So far, I’ve found people nearby have been mostly men (I’ve only run into girls in the city, it seems to be all men on the Peninsula — 7 women vs 14 men is my current ratio of connections total in my two days of using the app.) Everyone is a tech geek of some sort, which makes sense, because they are all the early adopters, especially for an app like this that is really frightening from a privacy perspective.

It’s cool how the app tells you how many times you have been near a person. At some point you may realize you are walking past the same person everyday who absolutely loves the same obscure rock band that you do, and then you can both go to their concert together in bliss next time they roll into town. This is extremely helpful to those of us who have trouble building a local friend network. I haven’t used it long enough to see if anyone bubbles to the top of my network due to repeat proximity.

What will be really interesting is what happens when I go to SXSW this week. Highlight is already being touted as the big app this year — thanks to its main investors being big bloggers that tell people what is cool in the tech world — and I’m expecting a lot of the SXSW crowd to download and use the app. It’s a huge drain on battery life (which is a problem with technology at this event to begin with) but it will surely connect folks around Austin. I’m curious how it handles when everyone in a room is using Highlight… how many notifications will I get? I’ll have to follow up on that.

One potential use of the app that I’m playing with is recruiting. They let you write a little blurb that pops up with your photo on a map when someone else sees you nearby. I’m deep in recruiting for a design position I’m trying to fill at my company, so I’m now announcing to anyone who reads my blurb and is nearby that I’m hiring. Anyone can message me if they’re interested. I want to hire an early adopter, so who knows, maybe this will work out.

In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy seeing how many people pop up in my list over the week. I’m a little bummed I didn’t make the app that I thought about a long time ago, but ultimately I didn’t lunge at it because I wasn’t sure what the business model is. I figured if you have enough people sign up for it you can start surfacing nearby offers that are similar to your interests (heck you could have an interesting partnership with Groupon or another daily deal type site). It’s just that requires mass mainstream adoption, and I’m not sure the world is ready to give up their privacy that much yet. Maybe they are. At least something like Highlight would do well in college environments, but for most people looking to get into geo-location services, Find Friends (which is limited to your real friends) and other apps like that will probably get a lot faster mainstream adoption.

What do you think? Have you used Highlight yet? Have you made any meaningful connections on the app?

Now, there are a few types of brands who greatly benefit from Timeline. Notice I say “who” because the brands that can benefit from this change are brands that are about people. From Musicians to Livestrong, these brands ongoing content and, most importantly, a history of engaging with fans through conversation. This is because Timeline was designed to tell the story of a person’s life, from their birth to, well, their death. I have issues with the Timeline UI to begin with for that purpose, but at least it makes sense for a person. However, not every brand wants their audience to remember who they were 50, 20, 5, or even 1 year ago. (Re)branding agencies are a big business for that reason.

Brands like Macy’s, which have a stable brand image and message that hasn’t changed through the years, have clearly heavily invested in Facebook timeline for their launch, likely with a lot of help from Facebook and an (Facebook recommended?) agency, to create a quality profile that dates back to their first store. Even in this case that’s really cool in concept, I question how many people are going to scroll back in time to learn more about Macy’s on Facebook? It’s more an expensive filler to fit the new format than content people will engage in. The company, however, is on the right track with Timeline. It realizes just how heavy the investment in social content marketing needs to be to keep up with this new format. Not all brands can successfully do this.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen the Fanta page in Timeline — clearly their legacy was not so intriguing — so they created a “find Fanta thoughout history” concept, which I’m sure spent a lot of time and planning on, and it’s TBD whether anyone cares to engage with that content. Their latest post seems to have 0 comments and 12 likes. Notice the spam comments on the post in the upper right. More on that later.

The bigger issue I have with Timeline, and all the “ooh” and “awwing” over how wonderful it is for brands, is that the transition to Timeline did not occur because Mark Zuckerberg and team thought to themselves, golly gee, let’s make the brand experience better on Facebook so they can market to their audience for free.

Facebook, more than ever as it goes public, needs to ramp up on its advertising growth. The network can only sustain “people” growth for so long, the real growth over the long term comes from showing more ads and increasing the cost of those ads.

Those kids over at the FB are smart. They know how to create and sell highly-effective advertising. Sponsored stories are a huge part of that. They’re quite brilliant, and they work. Your friend wrote a comment on a brand, now that brand can highlight that story as a comment to that person’s friend network, and so on. The ads will get clicked, which means higher CPC rates, and it’s possible that even those ads do end up converting more for brands. That’s all fine and dandy, but no one should be fooled into thinking the change for brands to Timeline is really about helping brands create engaging content and to reach their audience for free.

Facebook had a problem with traditional brand pages, and they weren’t the ideal option for brands either. The current brand pages allow brands to create somewhat interactive experiences on them, often designed by a slew of agencies that have built their entire platform on creating content for pages, but those pages rarely got noticed by fans. There are stats that show only 1% of people who like a brand or product ever go back to their page. I’m not arguing that the current setup was perfect, but it at least gave brands the potential of converting their audience by employing clever campaigns.

Now, Facebook moves brands to Timeline, and everyone is infatuated by how brands can add a pretty photo to the top of their page, just like a user, and if they design it well their page can look nice at a first glance. Facebook is showing off pages in Timeline such as Coca Cola and Coldplay that really look great, especially if you zoom out.

The big problem is that Timeline itself is a bit of a mess. I have a little bit of beef with Javascript coders who think that just because they can automatically arrange content in a way that fits in a page, it is the right way to display that content. For instance, on my Facebook profile, there is a big box of Superbowl ads that I watched… a good month ago… as well as a second box under it of the same ads, tagged as videos, that I watched, which for some reason hasn’t been bumped down my profile because it’s old. There’s a lot of these experiences that clearly haven’t been thought through when Timeline was designed because some Javascript engineer fell in love with how he was able to effectively display a whole lot of content from different sources.

At the same time, even if Timeline does exactly what it is supposed to do for brands (get a lot of comments on posts so a few can be used as sponsored stories), there is an even bigger problem of all the spam this creates. This may not be as bad for brands as it is for a personal account (I now have almost 70,000 Facebook subscribers and the experience of reading through my comments is nothing short of pure comedy), but it is still a serious concern for brands. Facebook’s current brand page lets brands determine what they want to surface when someone first comes to that page. The wall itself hid comments successfully, which did not inspire conversation, but also did not open up the brand to a slew of negative and spam posts.

Negative posts on their own are not terrible — it’s great to engage customers on sites like Twitter who offer negative reviews of their experiences, turning a negative into a positive, but when you get on Facebook, it’s just overwhelming. On Twitter it’s pretty easy to ignore a post, but on Facebook all of the comments are right there on your posts, public for anyone to see. If you don’t respond to a complaint, this is bad social practice, but outside of heavily investing in a team to manage your Facebook page, how can anyone ever keep up? That doesn’t even take into consideration all of the actual spam, pornographic comments, and posts in foreign characters that turn out to be gobblygook.

I’m all for engaging with your audience, and think conversations are a key part of the social experience. But I’m worried for brands. I’m worried that brands aren’t going to get just how important it is to invest in someone or someones to manage their social media presence on Facebook wisely before it’s too late.

On the same note, this transition brings the ability for anyone to message a brand directly. Unlike prior Facebook pages, where you could not directly reach your fans, this allows brands to respond to anyone who directly messages them. If this works as well as I think it will, this is another huge problem for companies — how do you handle the influx of messages from Facebook? How many do you respond to? How many do you ignore? How many are spam and just going to waste your time?

The bottom line is that engaging with your brand fans via conversation is not inherently and awful idea, but the way it’s set up in Facebook leaves brands in a tricky boat. The articles I read on how absolutely wonderful this change is come from either social media journalists and bloggers who get that the current Facebook pages aren’t working, so they’re excited about any change at all, or, more often, from agencies that are going to make bank on this huge transition. And yes, I do recommend you invest in a good social agency to help you with this, because it’s a huge challenge to get right. You might have had one person managing your Facebook page before that featured a contest or promotion every month, but now you need a team of individuals to update content frequently, respond to your audience, and if you really want to do this right, actively delete spam posts. I don’t know exactly how many people need to be on that team, but it’s definitely not just one person.

It’s most important to be clear that Facebook make this transition for the following reasons, none of which are to “benefit brands.”

• 1. Facebook doesn’t want to invest its development resouces into building a sucessful page program for brands where they can actually engage with their audience. Facebook is focusing its development on Timeline profiles, which are designed for its users, and it’s moving brands to this layout because they do not need to invest other resources into a product that does not directly drive advertising revenue.
• 2. Facebook needs to make more money via advertising quarter over quarter. Again, they can only grow their audience by so many people at a certain point, especially in high-value ad-targeting regions such as the US and Europe. Sponsored stories is Facebook’s next golden ticket to growth. But in order to have sponsored stories to sell, Facebook must help brands increase comments about their brand. They are going to do this by forcing brands to post frequently to their Timeline, and solicit comments.
• 3. Alone, encoraging customer conversations is not awful (it’s actually great for brands if managed properly) — conversations via social channels are smart, and it’s great that Facebook is making it easier for brands to connect with their audience. The reality is, however, that “easy” comes with a price. Facebook is “watching” everything your audience does and says. The company has a huge team of genius data analysts who can just as easily take your audience and allow your competitor who wants to target that audience, just like you do. You will never own this data, or your audience, despite the giant investment you will need to make to properly keep up with your page. Facebook will own the data, and just like your competitors, you will need to rent it back for a marked-up cost.
• 4. Facebook wants to hold brand content hostage. It will surface content in the walls of your audience insofar as it drives enough contributions and commentary to provide content for sponsored stories. Eventually, if you don’t pay up, I’d only guess that Facebook is going to give your content less priority in the ever-cluttered Facebook wall. If you plan to pay up, great. But at some point you need to think about how much driving your audience back to your site is worth, versus investing in keeping your customers happy on your site, and wanting to come back because you have an engaging experience there already.
• 5. There is a lot more reasonsing behind the change that as a non-employee of Facebook I can only guess at, but I wouldn’t trust Facebook to stick with any program that is not driving revenue for their advertising programs. They have to do this. It’s not a bad strategy for Facebook, it’s not something you can ignore, but brands should not attempt this alone, and should be careful before heavily investing in creating a Timeline that tracks back to their first store in 1776. I’m sure the company has quite a bit of brilliant advertising technology and experiences up their sleeves to roll out, and it will be brands that foot the bill. While you’re saving your budgeting pennies to support this, pay close attention to ROI, and also make sure to understand that everything you do to create and encourage content generation on Facebook is more data that the company can use to sell ads to your competitors. I don’t have an answer for how to avoid this, and as a social strategist, cannot tell you shut down your Facebook page. If you’re a legitamite brand you need to be there, and you must start thinking about Facebook engagement differently. Just go into this with an understanding that Facebook is not doing something really cool for brands and marketers, they are doing something that saves them a lot of money in development time, while at the same time making them a lot of money in advertising.

The entire strategy that Facebook has reminds me a lot of AOL in the early days. Are walled gardens back in style? I don’t think so, but for the time being, Facebook has the eyeballs, and is an extremely powerful advertising platform, especially for a B2C audience. Time will tell if this transition to Timeline actually benefits brands, but I’d put my money on the only folks benefiting from this change being the people at Facebook, agencies that can handle the constant content and moderation requirements as well as creative strategy, and community managers, who will find an increase in the number of job postings at all the major companies around the globe.

What do you think? Is Timeline really a good move for brands?

Twitter’s primary following architecture worked very early on, when everyone playing the game of Twitter was on the same playing field. Everyone started with 0 followers, and 0 following. Then, naturally, prominent figures such as celebrities, journalists and politicians garnered thousands of followers quickly, while the rest of us minons were left with a dilemma, thanks both to a 2,000 subscriber limit and how poorly it reflected on us to follow thousands of people without having a reasonable ratio of that follow count in return.

It took quite a while to reach 10,000 followers on Twitter on my @AdenaDeMonte account. I haven’t been able to fairly estimate how many of these followers are real people and how many are spam, it still gives this Twitter account some level of status and respect in the Twitter game. My follow to following ratio is close to 1-to-1. A celebrity would be 1-to-1,000,000, such as @aplusk, who is currently following 695 people and is followed by 9,361,787.

The challenge lies in being a newer member of Twitter, and playing the game right. I recently signed up for a new Twitter account, @GamificationGal to focus on tweets around gamification, social media, behavior data and analytics. Out of the gate I followed approximately 1,000 thought leaders in the space, and, so far 260 have either followed me back directly or seen a tweet of mine somewhere and followed me without my following them. The problem is the user experience here is that at a Twitter user, I’m tempted to subscribe to interesting people who publish lots of quality content, butso is everyone else on Twitter. But these people are followed by more people, naturally, and are less likely to follow back unless they already know you. So if you want to use Twitter as a place to follow and read content, you quickly reach you 2,000 maximum following limit. The only tried-and-true way to get followers back IS to follow people, especially people who do not have a large following, so you’re stuck with the Twitter following dilemma — do you follow crappy accounts so you obtain a large number of people following you, but see poor content in your stream, or do you follow people who are unlikely to follow you back, and get stuck at the 2,000 following limit?

There are ways around this on Twitter. For instance, most Twitter superusers would use a separate application, such as TweetDeck, where they could “follow” users without following them, but creating lists of people to subscribe to, unofficially. Since all the content is public anyway, it’s easy for other applications to pull in the Twitter feeds in a way that is more practical for non-celebrities to interface with (and I’m sure this is also useful for the celebs who have the opposite problem — too many people following and engaging with their content with a whole lot of spam.) But I question why Twitter itself wouldn’t re-think its follow/following architecture, especially given how other social networks have now borrowed this concept loosely to varying degrees of success.

Google+ has the best architecture for public/private following, in my opinion. It still shows how many people have followed you versus how many you’ve followed, but the way the UX is designed, it does not look terrible if you are following thousands of people without having them all follow you back. Twitter is much more about this status than G+, which definitely encourages celebrities to play the game (and is why so many of them are active on there still), but G+ is designed more for the average person who wants to engage in public discorse via a social network. The circling concept isn’t perfect (for instance, it doesn’t motivate people to want to be circled by thousands of people, it is designed more to get you to want to circle other people) so it is not a place where place where big egos are easily stroked by a simple statistic. Even Facebook has this ego-stroking down pat prior to adding follow/subscribe functionality (friend count), so it’s not clear if this ultimately limits Google+’s growth and potential for success. It certainly lures a different type of audience, one that returns to engage with public content for quality vs the celebrity-status of the person who wrote the comment.

The thing that works well for Google+ is that its Circle functionality enables people on both sides of the following relationship to put the other person into a categorical bucket, where the person pushing content out can decide which bucket to share the specific content with. I bet some user experience designer at Facebook and one over at Twitter would say that functionality is too complex for the mainstream. Facebook does have a list functionality which lets you sort your friends into different groups to post to, but the functionality becomes most useful when dealing with public interactions.

Facebook Subscribe opens up an entirely new can of worms. I know, because right now I’m about 500 subscribers away from 50,000 subscribers. While on Twitter or Google+, this feat would take me years and a lot of work, on Facebook, 50,000 subscribers has occurred in less than three months. The majority of my subscribers are from Malaysia, India, Indonesia, and Islamic nations in The Middle East and Africa. The more subscribers I obtain, the more impossible my subscribe experience is to manage. Facebook displays your subscriber count very prominently on your profile page, as statistical status is still very important in the Facebook social architecture.

What’s wrong with this picture? Here, Facebook doesn’t care how many people I subscribe to, so I am not motivated to subscribe to other users on Facebook. I am not even sure how many people I am subscribed to, and that number is not important. Who does care about subscribing to people? Generally, older men from around the world who want to subscribe to young woman’s profiles. Facebook’s subscribe architecture had not been built with the proper game mechanics to encourage people in western cultures to want to subscribe to users’ public content. Why? There’s no status attached to subscribing to other people on Facebook, no positive feedback around continuing to subscribe to other users. At best, if you subscribe to other people you get a cluttered activity stream experience which once displayed content from friends only, and now includes people that you forgot you subscribed to one night because they looked remotely interesting.

I do enjoy the subscribe functionality on occasion, there are people on Facebook who I subscribe to that are not clear-cut, celeb-status public figures that do a great job of creating content for their followers, such as Craig Kanalley, one of my favorite public sharers on Facebook. Craig recently started working at NBC as a Social Media Editor, and it happens that he and I share the same alma mater (DePaul, go Blue Demons!) By sheer numbers alone, we have almost the same amount of subscribers — Craig has 52k, I have 49.5k. We both have accumulated masses of people who leave incoherent posts in foreign characters and/or their full phone number with country code requesting a call, though Craig clearly has more sane people subscribed to his account.

Viewing a list of my latest subscribers on Facebook, you can quickly see why Subscribe is the worst public “followee” experience of all the social networks:

If you think this is racist, and would argue with me that there are plenty of people in these countries who might add great value to my Facebook conversation, I performed a little test this morning, just minutes ago…

I opened up my Facebook commenting to let any of my 50,000 subscribers, as well as my Twitter followers and G+ circlers comment on this one simple question:

What are you doing this weekend?

Here are the responses so far…

Facebook:

Google+

Twitter:

While users are heavily invested in Facebook, the reasons people flocked to the site to begin with (simple social networking) to get away from the mess that was MySpace are starting to get overshadowed by an increasingly cluttered user experience. Meanwhile, Twitter is out in left field swinging like a blindfolded kid hoping to hit a home run, redesigning the experience to make it more mainstream-acceptable, but they’re still handicapped by 140 characters. And Google+ brags about its millions of users (90 million as of 5 days ago), but the numbers aren’t as impressive if you dig into how many people are actually using the network on a daily basis.

Facebook, set to IPO in the next few weeks, faces a whole new challenge of having to reveal quarterly earnings, which takes an ad-heavy network and pushes it to find new ways to monetize. Facebook surely has a lot of data to deliver ads against for its advertisers, but the only way to grow ad revenue is to either grow its user-base at an exponential rate, or keep people on the site much longer.

Since continuing to grow the user base is a challenge once you have 900M users, you’re faced with focusing on how to get as many people as possible to spend as much time on your site as possible. In a blog entry, Gregory Lyons of iCrossing recently acknowledged that Facebook’s growth in the U.S. and U.K has slowed or even stopped, but he expects India and Brazil, among other nations, to fuel continued growth to 1 billion users by August. Still, Facebook’s most valuable users are the ones in the United States and other key marketers that marketers with big budgets are targeting.

Mashable writes, “to put Facebook’s massive size in perspective, Twitter now claims about 100 million active users, LinkedIn has 130 million members and Google+ had around 49 million total visits in December, according to Experian Hitwise. That researcher predicts Google+ will have 400 million users by the end of this year.”

The total community numbers are sexy, but the real numbers that matter is time on site by users that the advertisers want to target. How do you keep people on a site longer? There’s plenty of ways to do this, but Facebook clearly knows that the more of your online experience it can tie into its platform, the more time you’ll spend looking at the ads they serve up.

It’s pretty a simple business equation borrowed from a traditional media model, but going from an elegant social network for friends only, serving the purpose of stalking exes, making relationship official (or complicated), and connecting with new friends, to an online social content destination is a bigger leap than Facebook wants to admit. And even if it has the right way to handle the large problem from a design perspective, a very vocal user base that likes things the way they are wouldn’t handle any major changes. So the changes occur in a sidebar ticker, or a subscribe button, which aren’t fully thought out enough to support the actual user experience they enable.

That said, they probably also work. I’ve spent more time on Facebook with Spotify and Pinterest now enabled, and I’ve enjoyed engaging with journalists through subscribe. I’ve used it less and less as a place to talk to my friends. I occasionally click on relevant ads, much more often than I click on ads on Google unless I’m searching for something very specific to buy that ads are targeted against.

Still, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are all walking towards each other, instead of focusing on being unique social networks that serve different needs. They’re all different channels serving up the same content in slightly different accent, and Twitter happens to just be extremely terse, and Google+ uses bigger words in long form at a slightly higher reading level. All three are suffering an identity crisis. The unfortunate reality is that as they all try to be the same thing, the user experience suffers. There is currently a lag between “Connected TVs” going mainstream, enabling social content around television media (we already have it around music and news/blog media), so the social networks have to do whatever they can to produce / curate / source content that keeps you on the site. That means user experiences being optimized to surface content from across the web, with Facebook leading the curve on this with their gestures enabling many companies to send user activity data into the Timeline and Ticker.

All of that activity results in so much clutter. It is extremely refreshing to then use social experiences that are simple, elegant, and aren’t filled with the world-wide kitchen sink. Pinterest is a great example of this. Pinterest allows users to “pin” images and videos from anywhere on the web onto “boards.” Users can create boards on any topic. While the site started out more geared toward women to pin fashion, wedding, and home decorating-type content, it has fast grown to the hottest startup on the web. It’s not a very complicated site, and in fact its search functionality is extremely basic. You view pins, you pin, you share, you collect, you express. It’s an extremely simple user experience powered by basic gamification mechanics. And the brilliant business model behind Pinterest is that the content itself is the ads. It doesn’t require complicated collaging ala Polyvore (which is really fun to do but targets a much more niche crowd.) Anyone can pin, and pin anything. While Pinterest now ties into Facebook’s ticker and timeline, the startup has long stood on its own as a thriving relatively new community. It is a breath of fresh air outside of the three social networks that are looking more and more like each other and might as well be named Facetwitbook+.

I predict that in 2012 and 2013, more and more of these simple, yet useful social experiences around specific topics will become more and more popular. The web as a whole has lagged behind social networks in terms of interactive user experiences, as for a long time there didn’t seem to be much point in competing — there were brochure sites and social networks, and the two remained separate. But it will certainly be an exciting few years in social UX, as the Great Social Network Identity Crisis of 2012 may just open doors for a whole host of new social networking experiences in the most unexpected places.

There are elements of Facebook’s Timeline that I like a lot, and I’ll get to those in a minute. But calling the profile redesign “the greatest change Facebook has ever created” is going too far. Timeline is a cool way to see your life as an online scrapbook (if you’re willing to take the time to curate your life for Facebook’s advertisers and servers), but where it fails is in its utility. Removing the old wall and replacing it with Timeline makes it harder to use Facebook. (Unless I’ve been using Facebook wrong all these years.)

Facebook’s challenge is to display a ton of data, while also encouraging its users to constantly submit new content. The old profile page (the “wall”) provided a very simple way to view what your friend has been up to, and to share content publicly.

Facebook Wall 1.0

The first(?) version of Facebook’s wall was purely utilitarian. It might not have been a gleaming example of UI, but it provided an easy, clear, and linear way to explore information. It featured tabs for “Wall,” “Info,” “Photos,” “Boxes,” and allowed you to add your own apps. But the Wall was clearly the most important. It wasn’t cluttered with new photos. It provided the basic information about the user. It looked the same on your personal wall as it did on your friend’s wall. You could go to your wall to see all of the comments your friends made on your posts and easily scroll down to see all of the latest interactions. You could post your status and easily attach content.

Facebook Wall 2.0

The next revision of Facebook’s wall featured a few improvements, though they weren’t perfect. It removed the tabs on the top of the page, and moved them under the user photo. It also summarized your basic information at the top of your profile, so anyone who visited your wall could easily get a snapshot of your information. Facebook is all about stalking your friends, acquaintances, and future partners, so this short summary of key information. It allowed you to note who your family members were, and list them separately from friends. Advertisements were prominent on your profile, and took up a lot of screen real estate. The “recent photos” feature was a little annoying — since it would auto update with your latest photos — and you had to remove any that you didn’t want featured in the top of your profile (note how this lack of control over the visuals at the top of your profile was “solved” in the next version of the design.

Facebook Wall 3.0: AKA “Timeline”

In this update of the wall, which is still rolling out to Facebook’s users, is a revamp of the profile page. It focuses on many of the items of data Facebook wants to collect from its users, while providing a personalized header image — the largest screen real estate dedicated to users’ expressing themselves yet. It also bumps the content much further down the screen, so there is less information that makes it above the fold. This makes the wall page less functional for viewing your own content. Overall, the design is not very functional. I don’t find myself viewing my profile page since I converted it to the Timeline. I just ignore my profile page. I used to view my profile page and interact with it all the time. I’m wondering if this is the case for other users. Do you view your profile page more or less since it was converted to “Timeline”?

Facebook would certainly argue that the place you are supposed to interact with any content — whether that be something you posted, or something your friend posted — is your “stream.” This may work well for users who have less than 100 friends and who avoid the subscribe feature like the plague. With 975 friends, my experience may be a bit unique, but the majority of people I know have over 500 friends on Facebook. This makes it difficult to keep up with people interacting with your personal content. Now, the only place to do this by viewing all of your notifications. But this isn’t as functional as the old wall/profile page, to view all of the latest comments on your content. If someone comments on your status, as viewed below, you have to click on a link to take you to that status page. There is no way to view content in a vertically organized fashion, like it used to exist on the wall.

The layout of basic information in the new design successfully highlights the key pieces of content that are important. It lets someone click to view your friends, your photos, a map of places you’ve checked in, and your subscribers (which I now have 6,482 of and am gaining at a rate of about 1,000 per day– a subject that requires its own post to come later) or, if you don’t have subscribers, it displays “likes.” That said, “likes” are clearly less important in this version of Facebook’s wall. Even Facebook recognizes that “Likes” are holding less value as we like hundreds of topics and brands for various promotions and other reasons. Can you name all of the things you’ve “Liked” on Facebook? I know I can’t.

Profile without subscribers. Here you can easily request less updates from your friends or more, depending on how annoying they are. This is a key new feature in the updated profile and new subscribe product:

So far, so good. The photo up top is a little bit like Facebook making up for all these years of not letting us customize any visuals on our profile, but I can deal. It’s kind of fun to have a pretty picture up there. I like to see what images other people post. They rarely get updated, but it’s more of a statement image than the constantly updated photo stream that was in the last model of the profile page.

Then, here comes UI chaos. From a programming standpoint, I’m sure there is an elegant beauty to being able to generate a layout that can fit a wide range of content of all sizes, from photos to check ins to status updates to the tracks you’re rocking out to on Spotify. This is no easy task, and perhaps one that in no way shape or form could be possible in the earlier version of the Facebook wall.

What bothers me most about the new profile is how the information is no longer linear, and it also no longer focuses on your content and interactions. Instead, if you read a few articles on Washington Post Social, they take up a big box on your profile page. These articles may not be all that important to you, or they may be old news — but suddenly, take precedence over other content on your wall because your latest physical activity was clicking on a link to read that page. Meanwhile, the worst of the layout issues is that the entire profile is now supposed to be a “Timeline.” This works for content you’ve added since joining Facebook, but now all of your photos (which may be uploaded at a different time or year when they were taken) are completely out of order. Facebook asks you to go and chronicle every moment of your life, so they can know everything about you. But the process of updating this information is tedious. I tried to add a few pieces of information to my Timeline about when I’ve moved to new cities and performed in plays, but adding this information isn’t fun at all. And it gets buried somewhere in my Timeline — why should I bother updating this content? Is the only value to provide Facebook more data so they can even better target advertising? What do I get out of this as a Facebook user? Do I really want to track my entire life story on Facebook?

The biggest qualm I have with Facebook’s timeline is its waste of screen real estate to visually communicate something that could take up less space in a more elegant, linear way. It is not natural to read content from right to left to right to left to right to left to right, especially when the content type is not consistent. Removing the best linear way to view your content is a shame. It’s nice to see Facebook evolving in how it thinks about design and aesthetics, but this product doesn’t seem to help in supporting the conversation and connections that Facebook’s success is built on.

Edited to add: When a friend shared this post, I was reminded of another time the Timeline wastes space. Upon her sharing a link to this post, which I shared on my wall, it showed up on my Timeline again.

In summary, Timeline is a cool feature, but it shouldn’t replace the profile page/wall. I’d be curious to know if Facebook is seeing more or less content generation since the new Timeline feature started rolling out. It’s great to show that she shared my post (thanks Courtney!) but it also means every time a friend shares my content, it appears on my wall again. It’s not smartly collated into one square — it takes up infinite squares. There are other ways this happens, I’ve noticed near-duplicate content occurs frequently on the Timeline. Facebook could tie all of the related content together, at least minimizing the spread of similar content, especially links to the same content.

What do you think about Timeline? Am I getting it all wrong? Is Timeline the greatest product Facebook ever rolled out?

Take Facebook Subscribe, for instance. I’ve been blogging about it a lot because I’m pained when I see good product ideas slaughtered by poor implementation. Facebook has the most users of any social network in the world. Why shouldn’t it be a place where we can connect to everyone from our best friends and parents to celebrities and reporters? Because, unfortunately, Facebook offers privacy options only when they seem to hurt the product most. Case in point — you can “opt in” to turning on “subscribers” and you can also “opt out” of allowing them to comment on your posts. Both cases of this offer broken user experiences. Opt in, really, isn’t broken, it’s just annoying for the owner of the Facebook profile. Opt out ruins the entire subscribe experience for the user.

Let’s focus on Opt Out first. When a Facebook user — often a celebrity, Facebook employee, or otherwise notable type — decides to opt-in to the subscribe feature, anyone can subscribe to their posts. Since public figures wouldn’t necessarily want a free for all on their walls (which, in theory, should be the same accounts as their private accounts, Facebook just allows them to hide private posts and posts for friends only), they then block subscribers from commenting on their posts. Why is that “broken social architecture?” Because I’ve seen, numerous times, someone I’m subscribed to ask their subscribers a question in the post, but their subscribers have no way to respond other than to click “Like.” At least on Twitter, anyone can @respond to public figures, and have a glimmer of hope that they might get a response (even if it’s from their PR manager.) Letting people subscribe to your account and not allowing comments is broken social architecture. And Facebook allows this because it knows what happens if they let anyone respond to public posts…

It makes sense for celebrities not to allow public commenting on their wall posts. That’s what pages are for. Why do they need both? The best use case for the subscribe feature is for journalists. In this case, they can post their articles, and questions on topics they are reporting on, and their readers can post comments and share thoughts. That might be the only good use case for Facebook subscribe. Even Facebook employees turn on subscribe and opt-out of letting people comment, more often than not from what I’ve seen.

I turned off commenting from subscribers on my posts for a while, then I decided it was hypocritical to let people subscribe to me without allowing them to actually interact with my content. While I haven’t received the same number of comments that I received after posting on Mark Zuckerberg’s thread from hundreds of men from India and Malaysia who were convinced I must be best friends with Mark Z., I still get one or two random posts on my content, like the occasional “mess up my formatting” post seen to the right.

I have, however, had to block all friend requests from people who aren’t already connected to me through one person because I was receiving hundreds of friend requests per day from subscribers. This hurts my main use of Facebook, since no one who meets me at an event can friend me, and it has stalled my growth of Facebook friends of people I actually would want to be friends with. But this blocking was a necessity — my mom and other friends on my account were also starting to receive requests from these strangers, many who were still convinced I knew Mark Z., and the only way to get their comments to him would be to friend my account and all of my friend’s accounts.

Meanwhile, Google+ is a painful to use because they’re so close in getting social architecture right, but thousands of details break the experience. Again, there are issues with how content is shared publicly vs privately. Google wants to set up a world where you have complete control over the content you share. This, in theory, is also a smart/nice feature. But the problem is that control results in awkward/clunky social experiences when interacting with that content.

Here, to the left, is a post that a social media expert I’ve “circled” (subscribed to / followed) on Google+ has shared. It’s a link to a public article on Mashable. There are a few words (in this case two words) of additional content she has chosen to share, but nothing I could imagine she would be ashamed of posting publicly.

Yet, because she chose to (either on purpose or just by default) share this content with her circles, when I click “share,” Google first warns me to be careful who I share this content with, then promptly gives me the option to only share the content with people I’ve already circled.

So, while the link shared was always public content, there is no option for me to “re-share” this article to all of my followers publicly without going to the actual article page and sharing it from there. That is broken social architecture.

A quick fix would be offering a simple option to “share link” directly, without re-sharing it from the user who posted it, and without re-posting the commentary they added on. I’ve run into this experience many, many times (and I don’t use G+ that often) as one of the best use cases I’ve found for G+ is to discuss news articles and other content, but blocking re-sharing of this content makes the entire experience frustrating.

Meanwhile, if I was following a person — any person, for that matter — I could share the post with them. Google gives me the option to share with anyone in my circles, so it’s not like blocking me from sharing this publicly actually blocks me from sharing the content with anyone. It just makes it frustrating if I want to share the post with everyone. At least on Facebook, I can easily share any post… even those posts by public figures that they won’t let me comment on. I can like them, and I can share them. I just can’t comment on them.

How about Twitter? What Twitter does right (no, not limiting posts to 140 characters) is that it gets public interaction. It makes it easy for people to write back and forth with each other, and ignore each other, generally without hurting anyone’s feelings. The more popular you are, the more it’s understood that you’re not going to write back to all of your followers. But they can write to you, and you can read their posts, and you can decide if you ever want to write back.

Where Twitter goes wrong is in what Facebook and Google get right — privacy. Twitter has terrible private sharing features. I understand that for Twitter it is about public sharing — if suddenly they focused on private tweet circles the whole network would change, and become a lot less interesting. But even in the case of a public network, you need an easy way to reach out to other users privately, in case you want to have a conversation off line.

Twitter has always (or at least since I remember) had Direct Messages but that’s a feature that has also been broken for as long as I can remember. DM’s are supposed to let you write to other people on the site privately, as long as they’re following you. Trouble is… they can’t DM you back unless you’re also following them. I can’t count how many DM’s I’ve received from people that I genuinely wanted to respond to, but I was unable to write back because they weren’t following me. If Twitter wants to make this a requirement for their social architecture, then they should also require that in order to send a DM, you need to be following that person.

This, of course, doesn’t account for the large amount of spam that takes place in Direct Messages. The DM folder is virtually useless, which is why Twitter should just get rid of it unless they are going to make it a useful private communication channel. Otherwise, you just end up with people DM’ing you expecting a response, and you have no way of writing them back, other than a public tweet that they have .05% chance of seeing. And, of course, Twitter is lousy for communication and is more of a one-sided, personal PR machine anyway.

So… which social network will get the private, semi-private, public architecture correct first? I had high hopes for Google+, but inconsistencies like the one I pointed out above leave me underwhelmed. There certainly is room for another social network to step in and get this right. Or, one of the big guys needs to hire a team to sit down and walk through the entire user experience of public/private interactions, and make sure they actually make sense.

But I wanted to do a deep dive of my personal experience with the changes thus far. There are many additional changes which won’t be experienced for a while, because they require developers to build apps on top of their new open graph protocol, so I’ll leave detailed commentary on that for a later time. This series of posts covers the rest of the changes:

1. Entertainment Media Partnerships: Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu: B+
2. The New Profile Design “Timeline”: C+
3. Real-Time Ticker: B-
4. Updated Photo Display in Stream: A+
5. Commenting and Privacy: D
6. News Reading within Facebook: C
7. Subscribe, X# of Subscribers & 1 Week Later: TBD

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Entertainment & Media Partnerships with Spotify, Netflix and Hulu
Grade: A-

In one of the best updates to Facebook, the company partnered with major streaming media brands so you can share content about what your listening to, watching, and eventually even reading, in real time. Ever since I joined Spotify and spent my entire Fourth of July weekend making playlists, I was hooked on their unlimited free music streaming (and soon even paid for a $9 a month subscription, which is very unlike me. I haven’t even purchased a Netflix subscription, but the Spotify mobile streaming feature was well worth the fee. Plus, it killed the ads, which were often for hip hop music, which were quite disruptive when I was listening to my “relaxing / classical” playlist and trying to fall asleep.)

But one of my earlier complaints about Spotify was how it, despite having a connection to Facebook and showing me which of my Facebook friends were connected to the service, had an extremely limited social experience. The only real social features were being able to subscribe to their playlists. And, not-so surprisingly, few people had dedicated the time needed to put together killer playlists like I had. Beyond getting excited when someone subscribed to my playlists, the social experience was extremely limited. It was disappointing to say the least, especially after being used to more social music streaming sites like Last.fm and Pandora. Actual discovery of music on Spotify was limited to either clicking around to similar artists on the profile of artists you already like, or listening to new music that was advertised on its homepage.

When Facebook announced the official partnership with Spotify, I did a little nerd happy dance. I don’t yet care about Netflix or Hulu because I watch movies infrequently, and watch my television shows either on TV, or more often, directly through sites like NBC.com and Lifetimetv.com, but finally I could share my playlists with the world, and discover some great new (or old) music in return.

If you don’t already have Spotify, you can now go to www.spotify.com and sign up for a 6 month free account with your Facebook profile.

When you sign on to Spotify, they now prompt you to connect your live streaming behaviors with your Facebook profile. It isn’t clear from this how the music streaming information will populate your profile now or later, but as I rarely listen to anything I’m gravely embarrassed of, I opted in. Immediately, my friend’s Facebook tickers began to be populated with the songs I’m listening to.

Spotify music listening shows up in a few places across Facebook. I’m even still discovering new places it appears.

The most prominent place Spotify listening appears is in the real-time ticker, which is another new feature I’ll cover more in depth in a later post. However, one of the primary issues of the real-time ticker is that it comfortably displays about three small tidbits of information, and if your friends listen to a lot of music, comment updates and photo uploads, which happen more infrequently, are buried by a flood of friend’s live music listening. I’d imagine that once all the other media properties that have official partnership with Facebook take off, the real-time ticker will become a blur of content, but it doesn’t really add much to the social music experience.

In addition to the real-time ticker, occasionally Facebook’s algorithms decide to summarize a friend’s current listening in the general stream. I don’t understand why that happens versus more often when Facebook doesn’t surface this information in the main stream, nor do I know when my own listening preferences are being surfaced in my friend’s streams. It makes me wonder if they are happen to be catching songs that I don’t really love and are just hearing for the first time (see below) versus songs that I have on my playlists. How this information is surfaces just isn’t clear.

Facebook also makes your music listening prominent in their new timeline-based profile redesign:

This is one place where it makes sense for your music choices to display, but it also shows how any accidental content you’ve listened to will display immediately. One of the features I like about the timeline is how this could display over the years, to show the top songs you were listening to that year. This will be cool to look back on in the future. Granted, I’m not sure how this information will be surfaced in the timeline once enough data has been collected in this Facebook-Spotify partnership.

The whole experience is not (yet?) optimized to discover the best music. But the potential is there. Facebook is supposedly adding a feature that will let you listen to music live with your friends, or even watch movies live with friends around the world. That’s pretty darned cool. However, thus far, the connections aren’t optimized for discovery or social sharing of media. I can see this being iterated on and changing in the near future. Clearly, Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix have placed a huge bet on Facebook, and while Facebook may not need them, they need Facebook right now and will make sure the experiences within Facebook generate a solid volume of additional revenues.

Do you want everyone to know what you’re listening to when you’re just browsing?
Then, there are the various behaviors that many do on Spotify that might actually be considered embarrassing, once you realize all of your music streaming choices immediately go on your profile and throughout Facebook the second you press play. This reminds me of the day I was searching random words and clicking on random sound files and managed to find myself listening to an audio clip of a woman having a (very fake) orgasm. Not exactly something I want posted to my Facebook page. But that’s a rather corner case. There are other more common cases that end up displaying, which is why the partnerships so far get a B+. There is a lot of promise here, but it requires additional development to make the experience relevant, and increases the benefits of having your media listening/watching experiences connected to your social graph.

Spotify / Facebook Embarrassment Issues

- To discover new music on Spotify, one of the best ways is to click around and listen to songs for a few seconds, and decide if you like them. Now, if you listen to a song for even one second, it gets shown on your Facebook profile and in the stream

- If you switch songs frequently, they all show up on Facebook (while real time is cool, I’d recommend that Spotify wait 5-10 seconds until a song qualifies for posting to your Facebook profile)

- Probably the worse of the embarrassment issues, as one of my Facebook friends pointed out yesterday, is that the second you click on a song your friend is listening to — even before you know the artist or song — it shows up on your profile that you’re listening to it. While many people don’t mind sharing the music they love, it’s awkward for my friend’s taste in music to suddenly appear like my own taste in music, and it makes you think twice before clicking on music friends are listening to, which defeats the purpose of sharing music socially. Perhaps if you click on a link of what your friend is listening to, for the first time you listen to it, it doesn’t show on your profile. Or at least a setting should be offered to configure this.

… thinking of how this translates to other media properties, I wonder if I want to share my viewing habits with my friends. I don’t actually mind sharing that I’m watching America’s Next Top Model with other fans of the show, but do I want my entire network of nearly 1000 friends and 500 subscribers to see that this is one of my frequent shows I view? This is not the most embarrassing case of content consumption to be sure, and I’m a rather public person — I wonder how this effects the millions of other Facebook users.

Overall, the Media Integrations Get a B+ in My Book

The future of media consumption is social, and it makes sense for Facebook to be at the center of this innovation. It will be interesting to see how sites like Google Plus and Twitter change to battle this move, with Google having access to the entire Internet, as well as ownership of the most popular clip streaming site (YouTube), they can build in more media integration into G+. Meanwhile, Twitter, smaller in audience as it is, has a network of people who like to publicly share content, and could also come out with some meaningful media partnerships. For this battle round on media integration, I have to give the win to Facebook.

To be honest, since Facebook rolled out subscribe, and even a bit before that, I stopped spending every second of my free time on Google+. The good thing about Google+ is that it’s a much more professional network, and it’s designed to make sharing of content easy. But no one on Google+ cared about what I have to say… it’s full of people who want to “talk” but don’t want to “listen,” ie, the Twitterers, albeit mostly highly influential ones. It’s a good place to follow people who talk a lot about reasonably interesting things, and to comment on their posts. It is not a good place to connect with friends, unless all of your friends happen to be highly influential tech nerds.

Meanwhile, Facebook subscribe leaves a lot to be desired as well from a pure public social networking standpoint. So far my experience with the feature has felt incredibly spammy. Not only did I get over 100 subscribers of men from Asia and The Middle East who seemingly do not understand that my commenting on Mark Zuckerberg’s post means that I am not his “friend,” I received many comments that were three to five words of broken English, and, worse yet, my actual friends and even family members started to get random friend requests too — even my mom started to get friend requests from India.

On G+, I’ve noticed an uptick in male followers from Asia, but for the most part, I can ignore these unless they have something meaningful to say on one of my posts. I’m not bombarded with friend requests from people who subscribe to me because G+ doesn’t have a separation between friends and subscribers — everything is subscribe on different levels (or circles) of importance and subject matter. It’s a huge problem on Facebook that subscribe and “friend” are entirely separate, yet also oddly interwoven once someone is your friend.

What I’d like to know is how to take a person who is a subscriber and move them up a level — not quite to friend — but to important person you are following that you actually want to engage with. If you are subscribed to someone and they subscribe to you back, this needs to exist in a middle ground between friend and subscriber. I’d like to hide some subscribers and sort them by ranking. The privileges for subscriptions are incredibly awkward as well — it feels buggy when I g to a profile with public updates that doesn’t allow comments. That’s a huge tease — I’m going to share some content but only my friends can comment, and the rest of you can look on voyeuristically. It just leaves a bad taste in a social user’s mouth.

Google+ still wins out on a better social architecture, but Facebook has the network and has mainstream appeal, so I think they’re safe for the time being. They can always pull a Netflix by making a change too big for their userbase to just briefly bitch about and then accept — but, for the most part, Facebook moves in the right direction, with the eyeballs it finds new ways to make money en route to its IPO. I’m looking forward to hearing more about their music partnerships that will be likely announced at F8, especially how Spotify and other music services like MOG will be tied into the potential / rumored new profile design.

In the meantime, I wonder how many other people are experiencing the same spam-filled subscribe experience. Or, it’s not even spam, it’s just filling up your wall with a lot of comments from men that don’t make a lot of sense. On G+ I have a lack of visibility problem — no one responds to my posts except maybe one or two people who make an effort to +1 what I have to say. On Facebook, I get a dozen likes and random comments that are meaningless. Facebook just needs to help people connect with people through subscribe that are similar to them, not just people that happen to be popular due to being journalists or product managers at Facebook. It also needs a way for users to give permission to one list of subscribers, but not all subscribers, or to block certain subscribers from commenting.