Facebook’s video chat shows site is all about connecting with people
BY ANDY IHNATKO ai@andyi.com July 6, 2011 10:28PM
Talking with Macbreak Weekly host Leo LaPorte yields pretty good quality - for a limited platform.
Updated: July 7, 2011 3:36PM
I think everybody who attended Facebook’s media event on Wednesday and watched it on http://www.facebook.com/FacebookLive was hoping that the whole presentation would be a response to Google+, either directly or flimsily-veiled. Google+ certainly seemed like a tennis serve that screamed over the net towards a ruthless corner of Facebook’s end of the court and I was eager to see how Facebook would react.
I think what happened was that Zuckerberg was on a different patch of grass, holding a cricket bat.
It was a somewhat low-key presentation far removed from the glamor and precise showmanship of an Apple keynote. Instead, Zuckerberg addressed tables of media scattered across a Facebook HQ multipurpose room. At times, he looked like a teacher who’d just commanded the silence of a cafeteria full of kids, and was about to announce that permission slips for the class trip to Canobie Lake Park were due no later than 11 AM on Monday.
His actual announcement was about new enhancements to Facebook’s chat services. Existing features have received an overdue UI makeover to make them more prominent and handier.
And there’s a new enhancement: Facebook Video Calling. It’s a feature you’ve used before and you’ve probably even used this exact technology, too: it’s just Skype. Video Calling isn’t very exciting on the face of it but they’ve chosen to integrate it in a way that speaks to Facebook’s mission. If you want your Dad to see your daughter in her new summer league soccer uniform and you spot him in the newly-redesigned Facebook Chat list, you just open a new video chat with him. If he’s never used Facebook Video Calling before, Facebook will walk him through an impressively-streamlined setup process and he can be in a video call less than a minute later.
He won’t need to download and install an extra app and he won’t need to create a Skype account. His browser will download and run a small Java applet that handles everything. All he has to do is open the applet (Facebook will cue him appropriately) and then click “OK” a couple of times and then bang, he’s looking at you and your kid. Once his browser’s been configured, future chats happen after one click.
There’s a reason why tech product managers are prone to drink and it’s exemplified by my own first experience with Video Calling on Wednesday. I was watching the livestream of the event and shortly after the new feature was announced, a friend invited me to do a video call.
“Cool!” I thought. “This is exactly the scenario that Facebook has been boasting about. I just click this one button and presto!”
I clicked that one button and yes, presto: my browser locked up completely. I had to force-quit Safari and restart the app.
This failure wasn’t really Facebook’s fault. Safari (unlike Chrome) doesn’t sandbox its executables, for one thing. For another, Java is fundamentally squirrelly. Finally, the first things you should blame when your browser screws up is your horribly poor memory for past browser failures and your faith in the concept of a kind and loving God. The only video chat service that’s truly goof-proof and effortless is Apple’s FaceTime feature, which only works because Apple bakes it into every iPhone and Mac they ship.
Still, it’s a warning sign of how much difficulty this feature will encounter despite Facebook’s best efforts and intentions. There’s also the problem of ensuring that everybody you connect with on Facebook has software and hardware that can support video chat. I asked a Facebook spokesperson to define the browser and hardware requirements for video calling and was told only that it required a modern browser.
With most of your Facebook friends you’re home free. But there’ll always be that one person in your family who’s using a computer that’s so old that it includes a slot for a game cartridge.
What about Google+?
So no, Zuckerberg’s actual announcement wasn’t a big surprise (video chat had been a prominent rumor for months) nor was it terribly exciting. The only references to new competition from Google were casual ones. The central feature of Google+ is “Circles,” which translates to the ability to define groups of your friends and contacts. Zuckerberg described Facebook’s existing “Groups” feature and explained its lack of significance in Planet Facebookworldland, It’s a feature that fewer than 5 percent of Facebook’s users actually exploit, and thus has been relegated to the low-priority status of a feature for power users.
Zuckerberg listed Apps as Facebook’s new number-one priority. With 750,000,000 Facebook members exchanging billions of messages a day (according to Facebook’s stats), at this point Facebook can only expand the size of the service by adding a dating service and encouraging their members to reproduce as though their reality show were counting on it.
Instead, the goal is to make Facebook more important to the users they already have. More apps, and more of them socially-enabled to allow people to share stuff with one another.
This underscores the basic nature of Facebook, and by extension the difference between it and Google+ or any other social network. Facebook’s heaviest and most faithful users aren’t fans of Facebook any more than two people engaged in a long-distance romance are fans of JetBlue. Facebook is all about sharing and connections and nothing else. Every important new feature that the company introduces stays true to that message. Facebook has almost nil support for music files and they seem to be the last company to get into the music business, even as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google continue to search for iTunes’ weak spots. Facebook doesn’t want to sell you music: they want to help you share your favorite tracks with your friends and figure out if anybody you know is also at this same Taylor Swift concert.
Facebook’s new overt focus on apps reminds me of just how big Facebook’s next big move could be. A Facebook Phone makes perfect sense today and a year from now, it might seem like an inevitability. Can you imagine a phone without extended social networking features? When Alexander Graham Bell got his first functional prototype up and running, his famous exclamation wasn’t “Watson! Six letters on a triple-word score! But dammit, the device says it’s a proper noun...”
You see? Now imagine a phone that uses the biggest and most influential social network as its operating system.)
So many services ...
At this point I’ve been using Google+ for a little more than a week. I love it; I really think Google’s on to something. I keep tabbing over to a Google+ window to check on activity and when it occurs to me to post or comment about something that’s going on, I have to navigate the “Tweet it, blog it, or Plus it?” dilemma.
I tend to define Google+ as the opposite of all of the things about Facebook that have confused, irked, and disappointed me. That said, this isn’t a case of Google getting things right and Facebook getting it wrong:
1) I like the fact that Google+ assumes I want to maintain tight control over my privacy.
If you took a core sample of Google+ you’d find that privacy controls pervade the thing all the way all the way down through the crust and deep into the mantle. Google defines Circles as its top-tier feature, offering fine-grained control over who gets to see an item I’m sharing. I can prevent that item from being shared by the people I share it with.
(Dear Mark: if Facebook gave the same kind of stamp of approval to its Groups feature, maybe more than 5 percent of its users would actually use it. Love -- Andy.)
The people in my Circles don’t even know if I’ve defined them as Close Personal Friends, Acquaintances, or People I’m Stringing Along Just Until I Find Out If I Need Extra People To Help Me Move Into The New House I’m Closing On This Month. I can even mark an item so that the people I share it with can’t then share it with people I don’t know.
But that doesn’t make Google+ better than Facebook.
Facebook’s users don’t seem to want controls. They’re more afraid of people not seeing a status update. They know they’re in Planet Facebookworldland, not on the Internet proper, and on some level they trust the people they’ve Friended. To me, the idea of being tagged in a photo without my knowledge or approval is creepy; to the quaint people of Planet Facebookworldland, that’s what Friends are for.
2) I like the fact that Google+ allows for full and meaningful expression of thoughts, facts, and ideas.
To me, Facebook is just a lumpy pudding full of empty trivia. It punishes people for writing more than a couple of sentences and it makes sure that when a friend posts “My Dad’s surgery went badly; I’ve been trying to console Mom all afternoon” it won’t distract me from the equally-important photo of a co-worker who’s stuffed himself into a singularly unflattering Power Girl costume.
The medium controls and limits the message. I don’t feel like I’ve actually learned or experienced anything after spending some time on Facebook.
Google+ is as good at long-form blog-style posts as it is with quick link, photo, and video sharing. It’ll truncate a long post just so that it doesn’t dominate the streams of the people you shared it with, but all will be revealed after a click.
But that doesn’t make Google+ better than Facebook. Not everybody enjoys writing actual paragraphs and sometimes, “VACATION!!!! YEAHHHHHH!!!!!! IMA GETIN SOOOO WASTID!!!!!!!” says it all.
3) I like the fact that Google+ is a well-organized, beautifully-executed, dynamic and interactive webapp.
Seriously, was someone high up at Google recently kidnapped? If so, and he or she was the person primarily responsible for all of Google’s UI design before Google+, then part of me hopes that the company refuses to pay the ransom. Because Google+ is a huge step forward for Google. It retains their traditional “less is more” aesthetic while showing a new modern sensibility and comprehension. Every other Google service seems to have been designed by a computer scientist whose response to every suggestion, after an impatient sigh, is “Why on earth would anybody want that?” Google+ seems to have been designed by designers. Human designers. Human designers who’ve met other Humans before and who think highly of that species in general.
It’s a genuine pleasure to spend some time in Google+. As a result: I spend a lot of time there.
But that doesn’t . . .
On the other hand
No, this totally makes Google+ better than Facebook.
I mean, what the hell, Facebook? Why is your service so damned ugly? Why is everything so cramped? Why don’t you even care about showing off photos to their greatest advantage?
Why does it appear as though a logic chart of Facebook’s services, features, and UI would look like a piece of twitching roadkill begging to be put out of its misery? When you introduce a new feature that automatically shares things about me that I’d rather be kept private, why can’t the instructions for turning it off ever be as simple as “Click this, scroll down, and then click this other thing”?
Seriously. You’re shaming your family. Your cousin Terry overheard a couple of his friends talking about you and he was so ashamed, he pretended that he was related to LinkedIn. LinkedIn, Facebook. Think about that for a minute and let it really sink in.
Just a nerdgasm?
But these are just personal observations and opinions. Do keep in mind that Google+ isn’t even in public beta yet. I love it, but this might even be partly due to the intensely clubby nature of this highly-restricted invite-only test community. It’s all nerds, or first-circle nerd associates. At this early, limited stage, it’s like Google+ is a social networking service where they won’t let you sign in until you’ve correctly answered a 10-item lightning round quiz of Doctor Who, Star Wars, New Gods, and 1990’s video game trivia.
(I posted that line to my Google+ feed on Saturday.)
It’ll undergo nonstop tinkering before the doors are thrown open to the huddled masses. And when that finally happens, Google+ can finally be judged. That’s when (presumably) we’ll start seeing ads. That’s also when the same marketers and promoters who feel commanded by God to ruin every corner of the Internet will start polluting and gaming Google+ with schemes to get attention for their products, celebrities and scams.
So we all have that to look forward to.
Even then, it looks as though a direct comparison between Facebook and Google+ will be as clumsy as comparing Facebook to Twitter. It’s already clear that Google is indeed playing in its tennis court and Facebook on its cricket pitch. They’re so very different, and they’re going to attract very different kinds of people.
And as for Facebook’s user interface: I made some snarky comments about that on my Twitter feed after my first full day with Google+. I quickly got a reply from someone at Facebook, coyly urging me to stay tuned.
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