Facebook Redesign Leads to Filter Fatigue

Like many of you, I’ve been trying to separate the wheat from the chaff concerning the Facebook redesign over the last week, and, like many of you, I’ve found myself so overloaded with the activities of my so-called friends that, not only can I not distinguish wheat from chaff, I’ve had to summon up all of the energy I have just to log on. It’s been the digital equivalent of going shopping at Macy’s. Exhausting.

The problem lies with the stream, or news feed, of user-generated information that is central to Facebook’s appeal, and which was supercharged — or hopelessly cluttered — in the redesign, in an attempt to make Facebook more like Twitter. The onus is on the user, not the service, to filter the stream, and therefore put more control into the information flow. But confronting it all can lead to a case of filter fatigue. Until the Facebook redesign I’d never really thought of it this way, but one reason people like Twitter so much is that it asks so little of them, and presents itself in such a spare way that its feed of tweets doesn’t overwhelm.

By contrast, one of my Facebook friends, David Berkowitz of interactive ad agency 360i, admitted on the service today that he is “hiding friends on Facebook who monopolize the news feed.” When I got in touch with him later, he told me, “There are a handful of people who seem to show up all the time, and then I’ll check their Facebook profiles and find they are updating every 5-10 minutes. There are a few people, including my wife and Jon Stewart, who I’d welcome hearing from that often, but most others just aren’t that interesting.”

Like Berkowitz, I now find myself swimming in a vast sea of status updates concerning people that I don’t really know; my lengthy list of Facebook so-called friends feels more like a liability these days than a point of, yes, pride. But the problem isn’t just the clutter; when I was talking to social media consultant Alan Wolk yesterday, we found ourselves belly-aching about what a pain it is to sift through all of the content being shoveled at us to make Facebook more usable again. It’s asking too much even of us, and we’re both deeply involved in this business.

To its credit, Facebook is starting to make changes based on user feedback, and, as it has been open with its community over these changes (as opposed to during the terms of service flap a few weeks ago), I’m sure it will improve over time.  But the big lesson here: don’t expect so much of users — even though we spend a lot of time on the service, we don’t want to spend it sorting our friends into groups.