At first it’s hard to figure out what the title of Nicholas Carr’s A post on the occasion of Facebook’s billionth member has to do with Facebook. Especially since he hardly even mentions Facebook. It appears to be an essay about boredom and computer intelligence:

We’ll know that computers are really smart when computers start getting bored. If you assign a computer a profoundly tedious task like spotting potential house numbers in video images, and then you come back a couple of hours later and find that the computer is checking its Facebook feed or surfing porn, then you’ll know that artificial intelligence has truly arrived.

But stick with it. It all makes sense once you get to the end and reflect on the words for a couple of hours. Also, full marks to Parampreet Singh for a comment that references Sisyphus, and compares his plight (“to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever”) with our tendency to check our Facebook feeds constantly.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a few days. I just wanted to let you know that I have a very good reason — possibly the best reason. On Thursday evening at 9:15pm our second baby daughter was born! Things are a bit hectic right now because she is still recovering in NICU. I wrote down a few thoughts about the experience in case you’re interested. So please bear with me as we get back on our feet, and then I’ll start posting regularly again.

I do, however, want to share a post that has been on my mind constantly over the past few days. In A Brief Pause Ethan Kaplan talks about the role that Facebook plays in building stronger communities. At one point he said something that really resonated with me:

I missed seven years of people because I had no means of finding them. Finding them over the last seven years led me being there for a friend, however I could, in a time of the greatest need. I can fault Facebook for a lot, and scholars and critics can fault computer mediated communication for a lot, but I can never give enough credit to both for making that possible.

It’s true. We complain about Facebook a great deal, but I can attest first-hand to the strength of the community in time of need. But this brings up some other, more complicated thoughts. How comfortable are we with sharing our struggles on social networks? We’re having a good discussion about this on Google+ if you’d like to join in. At one point I said this:

I’m happy to post links, jokes, and sunset photos far and wide. But now that I need the community to support us, I’m a lot more hesitant. I traced the root cause of my reluctance to share more openly what’s going on in our lives to the fact that I don’t want to be a downer on people’s timelines. See, if the language of social networks is likes and hearts, doesn’t that guide us to only share the good and ignore the bad? Where is the room to say “Hey, I need help right now” when the nomenclature to respond to that doesn’t exist?

And with that, I’ll leave you with a photo of Emery, and a promise that we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming soon.

Most successful applications do a good job of onboarding users to teach them how the basics work. After that, good applications also make it easy to learn more advanced features simply through repeated use. You might make a wrong turn once, but if the application corrects your course, you never make that mistake again.

But sometimes there are features that fall between the cracks of onboarding and self-learning. It usually happens when there is some unique behavior in the app that is not only presumed to be commonly known by all users in the community, but is also small enough so that it’s not worth making a big deal out of during new user onboarding.

I recently thought of two such examples that I wanted to share, along with some suggestions for addressing the issue.

Twitter mentions

First, there is the issue of Twitter mentions. I still see people who I know have been on Twitter for years, who don’t know that if they start a tweet with ”@”, not all their followers will see it. This information is buried deep in Twitter’s Help section, where I’m guessing very few people venture to. From Types of Tweets and Where They Appear:

Users will see @replies in their Home timeline if they are following both the sender and recipient of the update. Otherwise, they won’t see the @reply unless they visit the sender’s Profile page. 

This is fairly clear, but if you don’t think about this as an issue, you won’t know to ask the question, so it’s not information you’re likely to seek out.

Instagram replies

Second, there is replying to comments in Instagram, which I’m sure trips up quite a few people. If you comment on one of my photos in Instagram, I will get a notification. But if I respond to your comment without including your @username, you won’t get a notification. This is not how it works on Facebook, where you get notified of five comments after the one you posted1. Instagram does have an easy way to reply to people with their usernames, but it’s a slide gesture I discovered by accident:

So the easiest way to reply to someone is to slide from left to right on their comment, then tap on the arrow. Or you can start the comment with an @, which will then autocomplete the name as you type. But it’s not something they tell you about explicitly. It’s also, again, not information most people will seek out actively, since they’re getting notifications for each comment on their own photos, so why worry?

A proposal

My proposed solution for this type of situation is fairly simple. In the case of features that don’t behave as people expect them to, show a lightbox-type message to explain how it works just one time — the first time they perform the action. For example, the first time a user sends a tweet that starts with an @, show a message to explain who will see it. And the first time a user comments on one of their own photos in Instagram, show a message that explains when people get app notifications.

These are small but important details, especially for social services where understanding exactly what happens when you hit “Post” is essential to the enjoyment of the app.

Related post from the Elezea archive: Best practices for user onboarding on mobile touchscreen applications.

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1. I think it’s five. But I’m not 100% sure. Come to think of it, it’s probably a good example of this type of confusing behavior as well. ↩

Naomi Canton’s Cell phone culture: How cultural differences affect mobile use is a fascinating article by itself, but the videos and photo slide show really drive home how ubiquitous mobile phones have become all over the world. For example, here are some interviews with cell phone users in Kenya:

Direct link to video on CNN

Kevin Kelleher in Facebook’s Growing Silent-Majority Problem:

This third group – the silent majority of Facebook users – hold the key to the company’s future. Facebook is never going to win over its harshest critics, and it’s unlikely to alienate the people who see it as part of the fabric of their everyday lives. If the company can persuade that silent majority to become more engaged in the site – interacting with bands, liking consumer brands, clicking on the ads targeted to their surfing habits – its future looks pretty bright.

I always find it useful to think about engagement metrics on the web in terms of the three A’s:

• Acquisition. Getting new users to sign up for a site/service.
• Activation. Getting those new users to make their first contribution/purchase.
• Activity. Getting the first-time contributors/purchasers to repeat that activity over and over.

Facebook certainly doesn’t have an acquisition problem (yet), and their ramp-up process is very good, so I also don’t think they have an activation problem. But I can definitely see the argument that they might have a serious activity problem on their hands. Kevin shares some interesting engagement stats, as well as how he thinks Facebook can solve this problem.

(link via @mobivangelist)

Joshua Gross’s post Nothing is Quite What it Seems struck quite a nerve for me:

In this world of constant communication, it’s easy to feel as though everyone else’s life is amazing, while you’re still sitting there eating cereal in your underwear.

Of your 2,000 Facebook friends and 300 people you follow on Twitter, it’s inevitable that some small percentage are doing something interesting at any given moment.

Looking at it the other way around, though, the vast majority of people are sitting around wondering why they seem boring, just like you.

As a father to a 3-year old, I feel particularly boring these days as the exotic photos fly by on Instagram. Joshua’s post reminds me of Sherry Turkle’s phrase “Who will hold a brief for the real?”, which I referenced in this post.

Craig Mod wrote a very interesting essay about community and content for Contents Magazine. In Our New Shrines he talks about building a community first, before deciding what you’re going to do with them. It’s a contentious topic, but it’s worth entertaining Craig’s argument:

There is a reality those of us long steeped in the web are reticent to admit: for many, Facebook is the internet. More than Tumblr. More than wordpress.com. More than Twitter. For a certain person, a very commonly found person, Facebook is a Yahoo! portal, personalized Google news, Gmail, Flickr, iPhoto, and Xbox. If you look closely, companies don’t post URLs to their home pages, they post URLs to their Facebook pages.

We facilitate lots of usability tests here at Flow. I’ve asked the question “So, what do you do when go online?” enough times to know exactly what the answer will be. It is always, without fail, a variation of “Well, I Facebook, of course… A little bit of email… Some Google… Umm, well, mostly Facebook.”

This might change, but I completely agree that for most people, Facebook is the Internet at the moment. I personally don’t like Craig’s proposal of building a community around something vapid before you decide what product/service you want to provide to them. I think it’s a dangerous game. But denying the short-term effectiveness of such a strategy would be naive. For better or worse, this is the attention economy we live in. For now.

Cap Watkins says goodbye to getting stuff for free — and celebrates a better way — in Death of the Free Web:

As a result, the web is becoming more localized, more niche. And what startups are beginning to realize is that they don’t need to be the next Facebook or Twitter or Google to achieve success and to grow a large, sustainable business. What they need to do is create products that connect with these small, but passionate groups of like-minded people. Instead of passionate users making up the minority of a product’s customers, the new goal is to make them the majority from the start. Because those passionate customers, it turns out, create even more passionate customers.

Cap gives some good examples as well. His post argues for a similar approach to what I discussed in Imagining a future without traditional marketing.

(link via @bokardo)

Hannah Donovan wrote a great article for A List Apart proposing some solutions to the problems of real-time communication feeds. From Everything in its Right Pace:

We struggle not only to keep up with each other’s data trails, but more importantly, to know which crumbs in those trails are worth picking up, as well as how to find them again later—like when you want to relax on the sofa after a hectic week and you know there must have been a bunch of cool things to listen to or watch that flew by on Twitter, but gosh, where are they now?

Once you’ve read Hannah’s article, also read Michael Angeles’s follow up called Pace, in which he explores how the Slow Movement impacts designers:

I have mostly stopped consuming from the firehose, and seek out the products that deliver a signal that I get more value from, more satisfaction, or that fulfil my basic needs with less fluff and noise. The decision to work with a product and team that follows those ideals is important to me as well. […] The Slow Movement is not just a lifestyle choice, but as designers, we can choose to have an impact on the world based on these ideals.

Last night I joked on Twitter:

Sometimes I want to break up with the Internet, but I just don’t have the guts to ask for my records and Phil Collins t-shirts back.

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) August 25, 2012

It’s only a half-joke though. I don’t want to break up completely with the Internet, but we definitely have a codependent relationship that might require some better pace so we can sort out our issues.

Farhad Manjoo discusses what he believes is “a terrible problem for the Web marketing business” in The uncanny valley of Internet advertising:

Today’s Web ads don’t know enough about you to avoid pitching you stuff that you’d never, ever buy. They do know just enough about you, though, to clue you in on the fact that they’re watching everything you do.

Farhas also shares some very interesting examples of the issue. Great article.

(link via @karenmcgrane)