Quick thought on blindly copying Facebook features

Quick thought on MySpace “News Feeds” - it seems as though right now, there's a huge amount of pressure to copy a significant chunk of Facebook's differentiated features, particularly:

• Newsfeed
• Self-serve advertising
• App platform

I very much wonder how useful it is to blindly copy Facebook's features, and treating the audience growth issue like it's a technology problem.

After all, consider the Newsfeed, which is a really interesting feature - it seems to mainly work in the case where you have a lot of personal friends where you care if they updated something in their profile, etc.

But in the MySpace case (and in fact, probably for all social networks who embraced the "open friends" strategy), it seems as though you'd end up getting a lot of news from people who you really don't care about. Because it's fun to be Barack Obama's friend on MySpace, but it's not as common as Facebook.

So the question is, when does it make sense to copy those features? Or are there situations where it'll very much disrupt the community because it's taking something that doesn't belong and trying to integrate it?

Just something I'm thinking about...

Comments

[AdamD]

FB would have the same problem for a lot of people if they didn't have a system to determine the most important feed items to show you. In other words, they infer from your other action on the site (whose profile you look at, who you email, etc.) who you care to hear about.

I haven't looked at MySpace's feed, other than to scoff at their me-too feature announcement, but if it's like other stuff they've done, they just threw it up there without much thought and it does contain the updates from everybody, even those you don't care about.

[Steven Loi]

Hey Andrew,

Just wanted to drop my first comments on your blog after subscribing to your blog for some time now. :) It's interesting you bring up this point. Heck, I think the crowd your speaking to includes my team and I because we're in the process of building our product. (Not to mention it's also becoming a norm for all social networks to be doing this now...) It's important to have a "Newsfeed" type feature for sites that will make your user experience better. Facebook's system is great because while the feed is personalized, there's a sense of discovery and pleasant surprises. It compliments the user's experience while logged into Facebook. I'm not so sure I get the same vibes with many of the "other" sites. (MySpace and LinkedIn come to mind.)

Steve

[DShen]

I think that users are coming expect certain features to be present in a social network in order to even want to participate in it. If you don't have a newsfeed, then you might not participate because it's a great solution to the following friends problem. Finding the niche feature, function, or attraction will be the big challenge in retaining and attracting users in the face of commoditization of these features.

[Eduardo Rocha]

Orkut has copied News Feed from Facebook, but you always have been able to "categorize" your friends. And Orkut let you choose which categories you want to see updates from, very nice :)