The Many Faces of Facebook
Meet Facebook.
And Facebook.
And let’s not forget Facebook.
9/22/12 - Facebook announced Timeline and made it available for early adopters as long as they wanted to enable developer mode.
10/10/11 – Facebook released an app for the iPad. Rumors circulate that Timeline will be integrated in December or January once the bugs are worked out.
12/15/12 - Facebook made Timeline available to all users.
3/1/12 - Facebook announced Timeline for Pages and delighted page administrators with a 30-day window (thanks for that) to have a visual approach in place before the page automatically switches to the new format.
5/21/12 – Facebook announced Pages Manager, an app that is supposed to help administrators better manage their communities. When initially released, the app completely lacked the ability to access the Page’s inbox but did include access to abbreviated analytics (again, thanks for that).
6/28/12 – Facebook announced an update to its iOS app that will improve speed but conveniently failed to mention Timeline integration for Pages.
Even the dimmest troglodyte with a penchant for clichés will tell you that mobile is the future, and Facebook has made it clear they’re developing mobile in conjunction with its desktop experience, so why are the experiences so different? 54% of content is shared on Facebook, so why is the ability to share friends’ status content completely lacking from their mobile experiences?
But the unnecessary innovation doesn’t stop there. Facebook recently churned out Messenger, an app that attempts to answer the question, “How do I message my friends that I’m not on texting terms with?” But when the ability to share video content is conveniently left out, this app falls a little flat. What about Facebook Camera? Don’t get me wrong, the ability to only focus on images while cutting out friends’ chatter is pretty useful, but sounds a bit rude when you verbalize the mechanics.
It’s time to rein things in a bit. Improving the current mobile infrastructure to reflect a consistent experience is a lot more important that creating stand-alone apps for specific functions. But perhaps this is all part of Facebook’s divine plan – to create a suite of digestible apps and experiences, then later provide a large umbrella that links them all together. Perhaps.
Mike Niemczyk is a Social Media Coordinator for Razorfish. You can follow him on Twitter or Instagram for the hottest scoop on social trends, southern rap and pugs
