communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

2/03/2010

The Facebook complex

The cross-over from analogue to digital is a challenge for everyone. Mostly so for people whose interaction with Internet is profuse but whose understanding of the mechanisms behind is small. Think about this: they say in 2015 coding will be the new literacy. You will HAVE to be able to become code literate if only to manage your blog the way you want it.
Until then though people interact with internet via dashboards and interfaces without any knowledge of what goes on behind. And this creates something I called the facebook complex - meaning the belief that smooth interfaces and easy navigation are instant and accessible to everyone and every online project developed. The way this works is that people become immersed in a fully functional interface like that of a social network when the latter is at its peak: the more effective and perfected the interface is, the more likely it is to attract users. so the largest number of people will have seen a site at its best, but at its beta beta 16.0 version. which results in one thing: everyone believes that everything else should work as smoothly and as perfectly as their social networking site.
But nobody seems to think of how long it takes before you get to that beta beta 16.0 version and the expectation is for anything new to work from the beginning like THAT.
with what I do now, this is omnipresent. projects need to be delivered fast but they need to have all the community functionalities of a long-established content site. How hard can it be to connect a site to Facebook without retyping in your password? How hard can it be to save a sequence of films in a preset order over and over again and show them in a gallery? Surely this must take minutes to do :D
The sad part is that the coding side cannot win this one: people will always expect more faster and better. Asking for more time will not work online where millions of people may be doing exactly what you do at the same time and have it ready earlier.
to beat the FB complex, it's not the sufferers who need to change. it's the people doing the stuff behind the interface

3 comments:

gaboss said...

I've never thought of it that way, but you make an excellent point. When people/clients hear things like "Facebook was started by two guys in college", they expect one Romanian student to be able to pull it off just like that (Aren't Romanians the best coders ever?). And isn't web programming just point-and-click? :(

andreea said...

Next time they ask you to do that, tell them Facebook is developing its own PHP compiler because they think current php is slow. A way of saying they use code that hasn't even been invented yet.

So relax, have a cup of tea. Do nothing :D

Bogdana Butnar said...

@gaboss yeap, and they also say :how can it possibly cost that much to add a button that connects directly to an account in HI5 :D
@andreea oh, I wish!