Evan Bartlett ‘s blog

I just came to the realization that Facebook is pushing lighter versions of web2.0 technologies from across the web onto its users. Kinda cool.

They’ve done something that most web2.0 apps havn’t been able to do, attract main stream users and get those users to participate.

News feeds are the obvious example, but they also have the microblogging like status updates (similar to twitter), structured content posting for links, photos, and video (similar to tumblr), and comment email notification (similar to disqus).

I guess, this isn’t a major realization, because Facebook was very close to the cutting edge of many of these technologies.  But what drives me crazy is they’ve really toned down some great concepts for the masses, and I’m left dealing with bad closed-community approximations of many of my favorite web technologies.

Lets look at some specifics:

1) They take my beautiful posterous blog, and make it really ugly.  I’m feeding it into the notes section via RSS, but it leaves out images and the format is pretty ugly.

2) I can’t reply or “@” people’s status updates, so its not nearly as engaging as twitter.

3) Though, they’ve gotten better about passing comments and direct messages (or facebook mail) out to your email, their main objective is trying to get you to log back on to their site to drive page views.  I might spend just as much or more time there if the conversations where more engaging, and I didn’t have to login each time to do it.

4) The news feed isn’t very useful.  I’m sure theres interesting information in my friends feed, but I’m not getting to it.  I know they have some serious filters, but that doesn’t seem to get me more of what I want.  I suspect its the lack of quantity, because you can only get one page worth, and not enough quality.  I’d also like to get these in an RSS feed.  Its got ads in it, so I don’t see why I should have to log in to see it.

5) Friending/following.  People don’t manage their facebook friends like they do twitter friends.  I get a lot of useless news feed updates because of people I don’t really care to get updates on, and I have so many friends now its tough to manage.  Maybe I’ll do a great purging of friends!

At the same time Facebook is kind of my addressbook/CRM to keep track of all the people I know, so there are people I want to keep as friends, but don’t want to share as much information with and don’t want to receive as many updates from.

6) Micro-publishing structured content.  Just like on twitter you can post videos, pictures, text, and links.  Unlike twitter, the UI is too structured, and it ends up not being as engaging.  That being said, I’ve noticed an increase in the past few months of my friends posting content, and other people commenting.

Anyway, props to facebook for getting non techies to do this stuff!  Hope the rest of these webapps can catch up and latch on to the mainstream.

I stumbled across this site, Simply Checklists, the other day, and I really liked the idea.

So many of the most basic things in our everyday life are hard to figure out (I’m assuming they’re supposed to be passed down from generation to generation), and they can prove to be significant barriers.

Think of learning to do your laundry, setting up your first kitchen, moving from one apartment to another (yes, these are easy things, but I imagine many smart people, who spend their days focusing on loftier goals, managed to miss out on these basic life lessons).  After doing these things more than once, you start to learn some valuable lessons.  What if we could learn more of these little tips and tricks before having to go through things the hard way?

Simply Checklists attempts to do just that, but it falls short, by a lot.  Its old school and takes an editorial approach.  I don’t know who wrote those things, and on what authority.  The whole site needs to be more transparent, and it needs to be much more readable.  

So its the thought that counts.  I just moved to San Francisco, and I could sure use a checklist of all the basics.  Wheres the best tailor, which dry cleaner won’t ruin your cloths, where can I get a car wash that won’t scratch your car…..All things I’d like to figure out without learning the hard way.