Text Search v. Structured Search - The Difference Between Facebook and MySpace?

Talking through the current success of Facebook and the defection of users from MySpace, it occurred to me that the way users search on both sites has a lot to do with the changing of the guard. So here's a functionality view rather than a strategy view.

Facebook's structured search, with the ability to find different types of pages based on
1) auto-complete
2) form-field searching is designed to find and identify specific people
3) search results grouped by content type

When you type a name of a friend or a Page, you get an 'auto-complete' which gives you a list to choose from of all your relationships. This is a very structured search, pulling real (and guaranteed) results from the database. Having a real ID in Facebook helps this immensely - first, last and location are required, where on MySpace your real name is quite optional. Structured text search and structured results allows you to search for specific information in specific fields, and see the results in content-groups. Friends, Apps, Pages, Networks are all groupings of results by content type. So if you're looking for a Bob Marley Group, you don't have to look through Apps or Profiles to find it.

MySpace was designed to connect people with bands, and enable people to meet online and new friends. The Search function, for better or worse, leverages Google's free-text search to find people based on name, phone number or alias. I'm not sure the choice of Google was thought out from a product perspective, but it was definitely driven by a 3 year Google ad revenue deal.
Using Google's free-text searching finds results based on an entire page of text, so the search picks up main profile info and URL keywords, but also friends' names on the profile, comments, descriptions, etc. This leaves the user with a large, unstructured list of potential matches, which has to be picked through. There's no way to say "the name field is the most important." All results are weighted using Google weighting parameters - inbound links and keyword relevance, the same stuff that's tweaked in search engine optimization. For example, my name might be Tom Kuhr but if if my hero is James Bond and I write about James Bond all over my profile. When a user searches for James Bond - presumably intending to find a friend of that name - my profile will show up much higher in results than James Bonds just because of this keyword repetition, even though that's not the searcher's intent.

There is a Browse function on MySpace, which enables a structured search based on profile parameters, but you can't look for a specific person this way - it only allows browsing on attributes.

Finding a friend becomes immensely easier and faster on Facebook. When I sign up as a new user, I'm able to quickly identify friends and build my lists. On MySpace, I can hunt around in Search, but the experience is challenging and slow and I need to page through results, constantly refine my search, and my network grows much less quickly. I think the use of Google for search on MySpace has contributed to the company's inability to maintain the leadership position as a social network, and is further driving its move to become an "interactive" entertainment company rather than a network.

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Don't be Dogmative - Be a Great Listener

I've identified a characteristic of managers that has been discussed many times before, but I don't know if it has a name so I'll just make one up: dogmative. A dogmative person that only cares about their black and white view of the world, their dogma. (As an aside, it sure is hard to come up with a good domain name nowadays!).

You know these people. It could be the CEO, a product manager, the VP of marketing or director of engineering. A dogmative person forms opinions very quickly and does not want to discuss, debate or understand different viewpoints. However, they're not confrontational about it. In fact, unless you think about it, you might not even notice that they're so set in their thinking, because they are always asking others what they think!

This ingenious strategy (I think most do it without thinking about it this way, so its more of a personality trait than a strategy) let's them seem like the best team players. They form an opinion, and go around and ask everyone what they think. Rather than looking for consensus or new ideas, they are only looking for someone to validate them. They will hunt far and wide for one other person who agrees, and they'll use that validation to continue to perpetuate their own thinking. It's certainly easy in a company surrounded by Yes Men, but should be a lot harder to get away with it a meritocracy like an early stage tech company. I still see it more that I'd like.

I worked with a CEO once who is the very definition of dogmative. He has no real basis for UI design or functional requirements, and could barely read a spec. But, he wanted to be involved in just about every UI, navigation and screen design. He would pay consultants, contractors, and design firms to come in and do (expensive) work. Experts in their field. But, when they differed in opinion, he'd find a new one. We churned through contractors and burned through money. Smlarly, he listened to new employees for a week, maybe two, and after that started ignoring their input, as if they didn't actually have the expertise they were hired for. Like they just lost it somewhere. It was a very frustrating and pointless work environment, devoid of any delegation. Every decision rested with the CEO; morale was horrible; the company burned through about 3x the money it should have. Most dogmative managers aren't this bad, but in the extreme, this behavior is poisonous like a hemlock shake.

In product management, dogmative behavior wastes time and leads to products that don't solve problems. Thinking that you know what an end user is going to think or want without asking them is a huge mistake. No matter how much you talk to users, the very moment you stepped into a role as a product manager, you separated yourself from a real user. Be humble. Don't pretend you know the answers. Don't let your ego get in the way of gleanng customer insight by listening to real customers.

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Social Media is Based on the Real World - MySpace is Starting to Get It

The Future of Social Advertising? MySpace and Citysearch jointly announce "MySpace Local"

Social media, especially social networing sites like MySpace, started as an deluxe online forum or bulletin board and just took those concepts to the next level. They are based on the concept that people went online with aliases and met and interacted with other people online. It was all about the cyber-world, not about the real world.

While MySpace has been trying to become the social entertainment capital of the net, Facebook (and now Twitter) has seen lightening growth based on a different model - the real world. People of an older generation, more practical people, and teens (it seems like just about everyone who's not a geek) have embraced the concept of using their real name and their real connections to real friends, real networks, real businesses, real schools and are voting with their mice and signing up in droves. It's the online version of you, rather than an online avatar or what you wish you were.

MySpace, because you don't have to be you, is anchored in a previous era (6 years is an era?) and just wasn't built on that real-world network of connections...of course you can add friends, of course you can indicate your hobbies, of course you can use your real name, but you can also be friends with pretenders, rockers, and movie stars and parts of cyberspace groups. The premise of Facebook is you are somehow validated as really being who you say you are. It's not a virtual world or bazaar, it's a representation of a person's real life, something that I daresay more people are comfortable with.

Where am I going? I think MySpace has made a move in the right direction - to the real world. They just announced a partnership and integration with CitySearch to enable the combination of social commentary on the real world listings and information of a very comprehensive contained in the CitySearch yellow pages. And your interaction with these listings will show up in your activity feed - letting others know immediately what you like, what you don't, what you recommend. It's a pre-cataloged slice of Twitter - talking about your preferences when it comes to activities, restaurants, hotels - without the inundating stream of consciousness of Twitter. A practical application - and what could be a model for social advertising. This isn't what page I joined or whom I'm a fan of, this is me and my experience recorded around a real thing, a real place, a real preference.

I really like the concept - I hope it's one of many steps in this direction that MySpace takes to become relevant again.

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What Kills Site Conversion? Focus on Content, Usability and Empathy

I wrote a few thoughts on what kills website conversion for Patrick Neeman on his great blog Usability Counts. Patrick used LinkedIn to solicit answers from his network, which I thought was a great idea to come up with blog material.

You can read my thoughts here.

http://www.usabilitycounts.com/2009/01/29/the-linkedin-edition-what-kills-site-conversion-2/

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