Posted on September 27, 2006 at 3:15 PM in experiments
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
School- and company-based social network Facebook just opened up their registration to just about anyone who wants to join. Since I was previously not a facebook-er, I decided to sign up and time the registration process to see how long it would take if you filled in all of the profile fields they give you, giving at least minimal thought to your answers.
Elapsed time: 12 minutes, 9 seconds.
This includes registration, uploading a photo, the full profile, and the required e-mail and SMS verification. At 9 minutes, 54 seconds, I was done with the profile setup. I even put in some fake information to make the process a little faster and not have to think about whether I want my physical address available to friends. That all feels a little on the long side for something that's supposed to be fun and social.
While you can skip as many profile fields as you want, there's no "express lane" path that only gives you what Facebook feels are the best profile attributes to start with. So if you want to shave time off of the signup process, you'd have to go through the whole thing and just pick and choose what you want to answer. I'd love to see something where if you chose, you'd be presented with a few indicative or useful questions to answer, and then you're sent straight to the verification and "you're good" screens. I tend to flail or bail when I get caught in a long profile setup purgatory.
Observations about Facebook at first glance:
- Minimalist, clean, simple design (at least of what I've seen in the registration phase). I think in the profile pages it could do a better job visually prioritizing information, but it's definitely worlds cleaner than myspace.
- Very handy auto-completion on fields that have likely common responses (city and state selection, school selection, job selection, etc.)
- Thinking in terms of "network" right away - When you join, it asks you whether you're a school/alum person, a corporation person, or a "regional" person. Regional is the default if you are coming in as a new user, which makes sense as a decent guess for people you might want to be connected with right away.
- Smart friend-adding feature - It offers to log in to your AOL, Gmail, or Yahoo e-mail account and scan your address book to see if any of your current contacts are Facebookers. Then you still get the option to add each contact or not individually. It also has a disclaimer saying it doesn't store that info, or use it for anything else.
- Can you change your name into a username? I feel weird walking around with my full given name as my calling card in here.
- There's an "interested in" question(men/women) -- does this mean who you're interested in to date? to be friends with? to connect with online? I don't like it when social networking sites don't provide good context for why they're askin'.
- I like the double verification that makes sure you have both a working e-mail and a mobile phone. I think that probably slows down the spammers and creeps somewhat.
- I like the "my privacy" tab that lets you decide which kinds of searches your information will show up in.
There's a whole mess of additional conversations about Facebook opening its doors to the public on Techmeme.com.
Comments
The real reason FaceBook opened up was to boost its traffic in anticipation of a deal with Yahoo! Inc. FaceBook has signed a no shop agreement with Yahoo! Inc which means it is in exclusive negotiations with Yahoo! Inc. Of course, no shop agreements have expiration dates. You can just bet that FaceBook, aka Mark Zuckerburg, wants to keep the Yahooligans hot and heavy while the corporate development is pouring over the traffic numbers from FaceBook.
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Posted by Mr Wave Theory | September 27, 2006 8:53 PM
Dave, I went through the same Facebook registration process, because I was curious how the site compared to MySpace.
I also created a 'group' since this is one of the few potential ways to connect with existing Facebook members.
I intend to ask our teenage daughter to connect to my profile, and see how that process is accomplished. She is a member of a University-specific network, and so I have no access to her profile.
My first impression -- Facebook is much more segmented than the 'open' MySpace model.
Posted by David H. Deans | October 7, 2006 12:03 PM