He got women to smoke by calling them 'freedom torches' and orchestrating high society women to light cigarettes in a demonstration for suffrage.
He facilitated the modern retail industry by shifting American behavior from a 'need-based' consumer to a 'want-based' consumer.
There are billions of dollars being spent to increase the effectiveness of advertising and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the world's biggest advertiser used subtle tactics to achieve this aim.
Neuromarketing is a pretty standard practice now, I don't think any of this is controversial.
I would really, really appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we ever applied the term "conspiracy theory" to the common-sense assumption that a for-profit company's business decisions are motivated by (gasp, shock) profit.
I can't imagine a universe in which they aren't placing at least some weight on the standard suite of "engagement" metrics. If that is the case, then they're seeking to increase the amount of time you spend on the site, the number of pages you view, the number of ads you see (and click), the frequency with which you scroll below the cut and so on.
Creating an interface that provides fast, easy access to the most relevant information means that most of your core metrics get worse. Facebook would have to be exceptionally smart and exceptionally far-sighted for their interface to do anything but get worse. They would need a corporate culture that is either centralised and vision-led, or utterly indifferent to short-term measures of engagement and profitability. Zuckerberg is a smart man, but he's not a Steve Jobs or a Larry Page.
I don't think it takes that much intuition to realize that treating your users well and building something for them will be better in the long run.
It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily.
This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'
For that, you want to highlight a specific picture or event, but still have little anecdotes sprinkled here and there. They want you to go through the Timeline like you'd go through a photo album where you'd have a mix of the big events (graduation, marriage, births, etc.) with the little things, so that you can hear "oh, remember that one? When we went to Disneyland and you fell in the pool…", "you were so mad at him that day! Look at what you wrote on your wall…", etc.
Not having just a list makes it a bit more interesting to peruse. It's like going through a shoebox of photos and souvenirs, spread them out and you see some things, not others… I'm not saying they've nailed it, but it's a first version of it and it's an interesting experiment. It's hard to make an interesting photo album by hand, it's even harder to make something semi-automated.
As as side-note: The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
I find that interesting since I personally rarely see people's profiles or timelines.
That's what your feed (i.e. the "main" page) is for, right?
The timeline is for when you want to look at just one person's activity... it's basically "WHERE user = 'xyz' ORDER BY entry_date DESC".
About the only thing I use FB now for is the feed, but then Twitter serves the same function w/ better control over who I want to follow.
Well, the whole idea is to engage the user. They hang around a lot more when they engage. If you give somebody a list they will trivially take the head the second time onwards ( they will pop the stack, for any imperative folks out there ). That's because the very first time, you actually traverse the list. From then on, the head tells you if the list has mutated. So your brain will save you the cognitive load by simply taking the head of the list and then saying to you, look, there is no need to engage further since there hasn't been any destructive update since the last time you looked. So you will log off.
To prevent disengagement, all creative media ( magazines, newspapers, movies, comics, TV etc. ) will assault you on multiple fronts. So you don't get a list anymore. So Time magazine will have multiple columns on the same page, with each column corresponding to a different topic. One of those columns will have a picture, another an ad, the third an infographic, the fourth some text, and so on. I took a bunch of semesters of screenplay writing where this stuff is actually taught in some gory detail - how to keep the viewer hooked. Never be linear - the viewer is smart and will simply (and often correctly) guess where the movie is headed. So confuse the viewer by presenting information in a non-linear fashion deliberately, and occasionally throw interesting but unrelated bits of filler/second unit stock footage into the plot. Spice things up. I believe it was the british who came up with the more accurate term "sex it up". That's what facebok is doing. Frankly, it works very well - for the non-programmer types. Lets be clear, your life isn't all that interesting. If I just show you status updates in a list, you will be bored stiff after a point. But if I introduce a tiny element of stochastic displacement in your timeline, you will wonder, hey, where did this come from , when did I do that, etc. That'll keep you engaged, and that translates to a longer duration on the site => more $$
Newspapers work well with multiple columns because there's no inherent connecting features. Sure a page from the sports section will all have sports related items, but in general all the columns stand by themselves.
Facebook timeline is united by time. As in, what I say at the top of my timeline might be directly related to what I said before, and that might be directly related to what i said before that, and so on. So as humans, we want to read objects in the way they were chronologically presented. But on the new timeline, in order to do this, we have to zig zag from left to right, to left again. This isn't engaging the user just as making me do jumping jacks while I read isn't engaging -- yes it is spicing up my reading experience, but that just forces me to relearn something that is harder than what I was doing originally.
If the timeline was broken up into pieces, I could deal with that. Wall posts on the left, images and polls on the right, etc. Give my eyes some logical way to focus on only a part of my screen. But the exact middle of the screen on Facebook is a dividing line between left and right that presents almost identical information, and I have to form a structure from that.
Taking another example, in movies, it makes sense that the movie makers try to confuse and sex up a movie -- our brains want to be stimulated. But there's a difference between spicing the content of entertainment and spicing up the delivery method that content is offered -- imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy.
But some TV shows (Burn Notice, for one) do this frequently. It works pretty well.
I don't think that works for everyone. I can read an issue of The Economist -- which primarily has a clean, linear layout of two or three columns per page -- basically cover to cover. But take something garishly laid out like Esquire, and my brain and eyes start to revolt after a couple of pages.
I think what you are describing works in certain mediums, but not well or at all in others.
However, both are wrong in trying to artificially catch user attention and time. It is like blackhat SEO, may work for a while, but it not sustainable. while but it is
Does anyone know what quote he's alluding to here? I recall skimming an article on it some time ago, but I can't actually find the original.
I've been thinking about this trend - and, quite frankly, being depressed by it - a lot recently.
I always chuckle at thoughts like this. If we want to rank on a scale of intellect it isn't clear that simply being a Google/Facebook/<insert tech company here> employee puts you in the 'smartest in the world' bucket.
There are PLENTY of people that aren't software engineers that are likely much smarter than anyone at any of these companies, unless we are to say that you can't be smart unless you are a software engineer, which seems silly.
It is in the same bucket with the clearly false 'we only hire the smartest people in the world' meme, also trumpeted by a lot of tech companies.
But "s/world/high tech/g" (and maybe "s/smartest/some of the smartest/g") and the broader point still stands, even without the hyperbole: lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
And yeah, it is depressing. And I spend my time thinking about what they're doing... not sure if that is better or worse.
Scrolling through 5 years worth of status updates gave you context for this (sortof), it was psychologically "far" away.
Being able to just click "2006", and easily see that stuff is creepy.
This is why I can't stand this timeline nonsense.
So...do I delete all of this stuff? I don't have a problem with these things being a part of my history, I just don't like them being presented in such a readily-available way...
But sometime before Timeline, Facebook made a change so that each post has an individual visibility to give users more control or whatever, and when I switched over to Timeline, all my old posts that weren't private automatically appeared on my timeline, and I can't easily change the visibility of all those old posts, that are now much more easily accessible.
I want the newer posts on my Timeline to be visible, so others can see the latest crap I shared with my friends, but I want the older posts to fade into obscurity, unless I actively bring them back again.
Do I want others to do that? Well, not so much. Timeline would have been a perfect product in my view if it only applied to your own profile.
Looking at a photo makes me remember the context of the photo. However a status update is different. They're more frequent, they're less significant. They give context around the less important things.
For example, I remember the first time I looked at my timeline there was a status update that said something along the lines of "Oh man new doughnut at the Dunkin!" I wrote it a few years ago, and it was Completely pointless, and meaningless.. but then I remembered it, because later that day my mom was hit by a car. The entire events of that day flashed in my mind. Frankly that was pretty emotional for me.
If Facebook wanted me to pay 100% attention to the Status feed, they've succeeded. And by Status feed, I don't mean whatever that thing on the right frame is. Who reads that anyway?
What I despise is the lack of privacy, because if I tag a photo with a friend's name, all their friends can see it, regardless of my privacy settings which forces me to no longer tag my friends.
I basically have stopped using Facebook except for reading up on the newsfeed.
So lucky for us, if Facebook were really basing their designs around what is more Poor Richard's Almanac than the Bible, we can build far more compelling experiences than Facebook using actual cutting-edge psychology - and I feel kinda lucky to get paid to do just that.
That said, Kahneman Tversky and Ariely dont deal with scene perception - which is what you would want to look into if you were interested in planting ads. They all started off as vision researchers then shifted into deeper cognitive work.
If you want some scene perception look into Dan Simons or Ron Rensink.
Why [Everyone Else] Is a Hypocrite -Kurzban
How The Mind Works -Pinker
The Stuff of Thought -Pinker
The Evolution of Human Sexuality -Symons
Where Mathematics Comes From -Lakoff & Nunez
Passions Within Reason -Frank
Culture of Honor -Nisbett & CohenJoking. But the Timeline view in the iOS app places all items in a single column.
That said, Facebook has basically become a place where I sync my tweets and other services like Instagram so that people that I know who don't use Twitter yet can see them.
One example in the book is that even hard to read fonts can cause cognitive strain and make you judge the content of the text differently. I see that as being largely analogous.
However, I can't remember anything backing your assertion that System 2 is more susceptible to advertising. In fact, my reading is the opposite: System 1 cannot help but read words or look at images, and it is easily swayed by various advertising techniques. It would be System 2 that processes what's happening, realizes you are trying to be sold something that you probably don't want/need, then rejects it. Isn't it a lack of engagement of System 2 that leads people to instinctively click ads or follow spam links?
I lacked this language, but yes I think that's a fair reading of my position.
There's a broader argument that facebook really is providing a valuable service to us by making us aware of products and services that really will make our lives better. I'm unmoved by that claim, as I suspect most of us are.
While I tend to give the people at Facebook less credit, I do think there's a similar idealism at the core of the project. But I think they're fundamentally undermining human connection in many subtle ways that I've written about on my blog. Specifically, and more to the point, I think Timeline undermines the human intimacy of private sharing for the benefit of public performance.
http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and-perf...
In case you missed it, to be clear - you are not the target audience.
That might not make sense to people with a simplistic view of what corporations are for, but I think it's true nonetheless.
It's a powerful solution to the problem of browsing all of a user's content over time, which was very difficult in the old profile. And it's a perfectly good reason for Facebook to try Timeline without ascribing ulterior motives.
I'm not sure what the author is referring to, but the ads on the side (regrettably IMO) look nothing like the organic content in the main Timeline columns. There isn't enough space to show more organic content on the side as there is next to the Newsfeed. Why does the OP think that the ads are "nearly identical" to organic content?
I assumed other people used facebook like me: To read what friends had posted, maybe occasionally post myself and respond to messages/events, nothing more.
The only timeline I have seen was one in which my friend put a picture of baby Jesus as his birth picture...
Maybe the third-smartest. The smartest people in the world probably aren't working hard, period. The second-smartest people are working hard to build shit that sells itself.
I click on Google ads at least a couple times a month, because they tend to be relevant to what I'm looking for at the moment.