3 Things Facebook Does Very Well

In recent months, Facebook and its young CEO have received a bevy of criticism from users and press following the company’s decision to automatically opt all users into its Open Graph initiative. In spite of all the ruckus however, Facebook continues to thrive.

Web denizens may be financing the next Facebook alternative, but right now the majority of the Facebook population has yet to abandon ship.

We stay because it’s hard to leave. It’s hard to leave because Facebook has become a digital repository of everything that matters to us. Our friends and family use Facebook, preferred brands give us freebies through Facebook, our favorite games make us come back for more, and whenever we’re passionate about something, Facebook helps our message reach the world.

We stay because at the end of the day, Facebook gets right a few core components that separate the service from its competitors. These components are engaging features, the agility to make quick changes and handle enormous traffic, and the resoluteness to stay true to the original vision for the site with each new feature release.

Engaging Features

Facebook is a time suck. According to Nielsen data from April 2010, the average person spends six hours on Facebook per month.

There is a simple reason people spend so much on Facebook — engaging, borderline hypnotic features. Login to Facebook to add a friend and suddenly you’re sucked in by notifications of friends commenting or “Liking” your posts, photos of friends and family members and news flowing in from your favorite Pages.

Facebook — moreso than any other social network — has mastered the art of building features that demand attention and speak an emotional language that extends beyond a single country or demographic.

The News Feed, a controversial feature when initially released, is perhaps the most engaging of all, as it draws the user’s attention to the flow of content from his or her friends. It eliminates the “what now?” moment that online users face when logging into any site. Even with just a handful of friends and a few “Liked” Pages, the average Facebook user is presented with a myriad of things to do, most of which have a feel-good quality about them.

On the features front, Facebook has also managed to build the world’s largest social platform, extending users’ social graphs to their favorite games, applications and websites both inside and outside of Facebook. Whether you use an iPhone or iPad app to check the feed, or fire up a new round of Farmville, your Facebook friends are right there with you. It’s this relationship-oriented context that makes everything — even the most bleeding edge ideas — seem familiar, if not fun.

Agility

Facebook is fast to act, making it one of the most agile companies online, especially considering its massive size.

This agility is most often seen in reactionary circumstances. It has become a somewhat predictable pattern for Facebook to release a huge update — whether it be a feature or change to the terms of service — that passionate users react to with vocal cries of outrage. Facebook then swiftly responds with blog posts from executives and a few changes that help to pacify members.

Most recently we saw this agility in Facebook’s quick reaction to growing privacy concerns. In a matter of weeks, the company managed to drastically simplify site privacy settings that had become impossible to manage after years of modification. While the company’s speedy privacy control overhaul may not have addressed the primary concern behind the upheaval, it was an aggressive change that did quiet much of the anti-Facebook rhetoric.

For a site with nearly 500 million members, Facebook does a remarkable job at listening to user feedback and implementing changes when it deems them appropriate.

Of course, the company should be credited for more than its reactionary maneuvers. Over the years, Facebook’s user base has ballooned to astronomical proportions, and along the way the site’s done an impressive job keeping the lights on, firing off new features, experimenting, supporting businesses with Pages and releasing international versions.

This agility is all the more obvious now as Facebook remains constant while Twitter continues to buckleunder traffic pressure.

Vision

Like it or not, Facebook has a vision of making the world more open. This vision reportedly dates back to Facebook’s 2004 origins at Harvard.

In the book, The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick writes that just a short time after “Thefacebook” launched in February 2004, Zuckerberg had already explained his vision to Tricia Black with Y2M, an early advertising partner.

The excerpt reads:

“Even then he had his own vision for the potential of Thefacebook, and it didn’t have a lot to do with money. “We’re going to change the world,” Black remembers him saying. “I think we can make the world a more open place.”

This vision is one that we’ve been hearing more and more about in recent weeks. Zuckerberg has taken to public forums to express his steadfast commitment to this vision, especially when coming to the defense of Instant Personalization. Zuckerberg also proudly dons the now famous company hoodie that is branded with the Facebook insignia, as depicted above. The insignia captures the company’s vision of making the world more open and connected through [Open] Graph, Platform and Stream.

In hindsight, it’s easy to tie Zuckerberg’s grandiose vision to the evolution of the site. Just look at the News Feed, Facebook Platform, the “Everyone” option, and now the “Like” buttons. The News Feed made content from friends more accessible, Platform introduced third-party application integration, the “Everyone” option began to acclimate users to the idea of publishing content publicly (to the Stream) and the “Like” buttons serve as digital rewards for those who engage with third-party content.

Clearly, Facebook has stayed true to its vision over the years, and while everyone may not agree with it, it’s this consistency that’s led to focused innovation on the feature front.