Five Things Facebook Should Fix Immediately

Let me start with two questions. Why is it that such a successful company as Facebook feels like it needs to change and reinvent its interface constantly? And why are we so complacent with these changes that, quite literally, disrupt our online social lives?

We have seen how social media is changing the world around us, yet we don’t have a say in its progress. Undeniably, Facebook is already part of all of our lives, even for non-users.

We shouldn’t take the site for granted. After all, it has over half a billion users. Alternatively, we should not allow it to take us—their users—for granted either. I remember back when I was heavily using Digg, they made so many changes, that it was all too hard to follow. At around version 4, I couldn’t use it anymore and therefore left the site.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of new design and up-to-date features. But when one has such a large community of users, you need to make changes carefully and not force your members to suffer through your own growing pains. It’s true, we can all leave the site if we are upset with the changes. No one is forcing us to be members. But most of us don’t want to leave. We want to be part of this community. Facebook should acknowledge some of the problems that need to be resolved and show appreciation for the mass following they have built before it slips away.

I’d like to highlight 5 critical problems that Facebook needs to fix immediately:

Groups
One day I saw this update on my Facebook feed: “If one more person adds me to a group, I’m sending you to the unfriended land.” I easily related to this, can’t you? I don’t know what Facebook was thinking by letting anyone add you to a group, and start sending messages as a default setting. That’s like saying: Hello spam, come visit me more often. And yes, your Facebook friends are the biggest spammers in the world, they just might not know it.

By the time I wake up in the morning, my mailbox has at least two new group invites (I’m not sure we can even call them invites), and email discussions around this group, mostly from people that have no clue why this group owner added them. Couldn’t you handle this one better Facebook? Shouldn’t I get an email suggesting that I join this group in the first place? And thank god, my chatbox is closed most of the time because if I had to get all of those Group discussions inside chat, I’d go nuts. I’m a member of my high school’s group (something that is always nice to remember) but I know some people that left the group since the chat was too annoying for them and they didn’t want to deal with (nor understand) the odd settings. So rant number one: Make groups less spammy.

Photo Viewer

I wanted to leave this section open and let you all say whatever that comes to your mind.. but I feel like I must say it out loud: What the hell?!

How did this design replace the previous one? The user experience is so completely wrong here. The light box annoys the eye and basically it is just a bad visual that doesn’t fit the overall design of the site. A photo viewer is for viewing pictures, but the pictures are now displayed in a smaller format so you get a poorer experience than before. Why did you fix something that wasn’t broken, Facebook?

And before you tell me to click F5 and forget about it, I don’t want to and I shouldn’t have to either. I think it looks bad, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, and since photos are a huge part of the site, I also don’t think it’s a good idea to change it from good to worse. Usually, it goes the other way around.

Places
To have a world of possibilities is sometimes great and sometimes confusing. I love both Foursquare and Gowalla, and only lately have I started to use Facebook Places. But when it comes to choosing one service, Facebook is my last choice. Why? You can’t connect it to Twitter. Perhaps Facebook thinks all my friends are on Facebook, but even so, if I want them to know where I am, I’d like to extend this ability to make sure they’ll be able to see my statuses from other platforms as well. I still don’t get why Facebook is so closed. If people want privacy they can set their own personal choices. What if other people want to share more? I think Facebook should allow it. After all, it’s a “social” network, right?

Messaging
I can honestly say that I haven’t switched from the old messaging platform to the new one. But I’ve noticed people sending me up to 10 emails when they meant to send only one. Most people don’t know how to fix this so they always just apologize for sending too many messages, which results in even more messages. Overall, it looks like Facebook is trying to make everything behave like chat (i.e., new commenting system) when chat is not something everyone feels comfortable using all the time.

Tabs
Now, I don’t want to say Facebook is evil, but I don’t really understand how they could dismiss the customized tabs so easily after people worked so hard on them, and many companies were built specifically around this creation space. Yes, I know you can still see tabs, but not as prominently as before. Again, this was to me at least the part of Facebook that was fun and now has been marginalized. With the latest changes from FBML to Iframe, many users who could create customized tabs on their own have been left with obsolete skills. Seriously, if a company asked me if it’s worth it to create something from the Facebook API, I’d say it’s a risky situation since Facebook so easily changes things solely for their own benefit. Tabs are one great example of that. I would never expect them to change such a great feature. One that really gave users and brands the feeling of ownership but, alas they did…

Remember when it used to be so much fun to use Facebook? When you had games right in your face (not just news), when you could see your connections from Flickr, Youtube, and other sites, when it was just a more friendly place? I miss that.

Does Facebook not care anymore? Or does it just demonstrate our own apathy and powerlessness as users?

Social media is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Don’t forget you have a voice. Use it. You can start in comments below.

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Top 5 YouTube Marketing Mistakes Committed by Small Businesses

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

The path to YouTube marketing success can be littered with potholes that budget- and time-strapped small businesses can’t afford to fall in to.

We’ve spoken to three top experts in the video marketing arena to get professional advice about the common mistakes that small companies make on the video-sharing platform so that you can avoid making those same errors.

For your viewing pleasure and enlightenment, we’ve also included a few successful YouTube videos that were produced by small businesses.

Some businesses mistakenly believe that they just need to upload a video to YouTube and wait for viewers to watch by the millions. According to Sarah Wood, founder of social video distribution and engagement company Unruly Media, this rarely happens.

“Yes, there is a massive appetite for online video content, but there are 35 hours of video content uploaded to YouTube every minute, so the competition for eyeballs is intense,” says Wood.

You need to manage expectations when it comes to the success of your YouTube content. There are a ton of high-quality, company-made videos on YouTube that never manage more than a few thousand views.

“Remind yourself that having a video go viral is a notable success, not the norm,” says Matt Smith, director of strategy at digital agency The Viral Factory. Smith counts Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” series (see above) as one such success.

“Blendtec happens to be one of the most brilliant viral marketing campaigns ever, and it’s the exception rather than the rule,” he says.

No matter how good your content is, you can’t just upload a clip, sit back and wait for people to come to you — you need to have a promotion and distribution plan.

“You need to think through why you’re on YouTube and what you want out of it, then tailor the content and the delivery strategy appropriately,” says Smith. “Putting content on YouTube is step one, step two is getting out there and promoting it.”

Justin Gonzalez, social media strategist for creative video agency BARS + TONE agrees that videos won’t go viral on their own — you must allocate time and resources to seed it properly.

“Try using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to get your social strategy started — then promote your video using those vehicles. At the very least, friends and family are a great way to get a video to start circulating,” says Gonzalez. “After all, you put money into making the video, so you better do it justice and get it in front of the right people.”

Although expectations need to be kept realistic, don’t think that viral success is totally out of reach just because you’re a small business.

“There are plenty of small brands that think they need to be a Nike or an Adidas to be successful in social video,” says Wood. “This is simply not true! Any brand, large or small, can score a hit in social video.”

And Wood has a great example of a small business with a successful video: Alphabet Photography’s Christmas Food Court Flash Mob (see above). The clip was one of the surprise hits over the holidays last year, garnering more than 30 million views and almost 773,000 shares on Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere, according to Unruly Media’s Video Viral Chart.”

YouTube is new media, it’s social, it’s about engagement. Don’t sign up for the platform with a limited, old media perspective.

“When you go into online video with the understanding that it can do more than just sell a product or service, you’re already ahead of the game,” says Gonzalez. YouTube is a social channel where people want to consume and share fun and engaging content, so don’t hit them over the head with a sales pitch.

“YouTube requires as much thought as any other social media channel and shouldn’t be looked at as a dumping ground for marketing videos,” says Gonzalez. “Everything you post should represent your brand’s personality and inspire some type of reaction from your viewers -– whether it’s provoking thought, laughing out loud or making a purchase.”

It’s certainly the biggest, but don’t forget that YouTube isn’t the only online video platform, and it may not offer the best chance of success for your brand. Vimeo, for example, could be considered a more credible platform for creative professionals.

“Businesses that want to leverage the word of mouth potential of social video need to focus away from just YouTube and explore the world of social video that exists beyond YouTube, Twitter and Facebook,” says Wood.

Wood also names action-sports site Mpora and comedy site Funny or Die as effective outlets for hopefully-going-viral videos because they can “deliver high-quality video engagement to a more targeted and niche demographic.”

Too often, businesses produce videos and hope to get 1 million views. On today’s social web, success isn’t always counted with stats or measured in view counts — meaningful engagement is what matters.

“At Unruly, we place a greater emphasis on brand engagement, so we also look at the number of times a video has been shared on various social media platforms, time spent with the video and uplift in relevant brand metrics,” says Wood.

Gonzalez thinks this is a particularly important point for small businesses, which have limited resources and must decide from the outset what they hope to gain from YouTube.

“Sometimes marketers get bogged down in looking at the metrics and trying to determine whether the number of video views really made a difference in the bottom line, or whether it was just enough to build buzz around the product or service,” says Gonzalez. “When you can clearly define why it’s necessary for your business to be on YouTube, you’re ready to move on to the next steps.”

And finally, Smith chimes in with the most insightful and important point of all that will help any brand on YouTube — regardless of size or industry.

“Don’t ignore cats. Failure to put a cute or funny cat in your YouTube marketing material will cost you dearly in terms of exposure, credibility, sales and reputation,” he opines. “Everyone will know you are a failing business, and they’ll hate you and your product.”

- 5 Tips to Strengthen Your Company’s Social Media Voice
- 10 Online Strategies for Your Next Product Launch
- 10 Fascinating YouTube Facts That May Surprise You
- HOW TO: Engage and Mobilize Facebook Fans Beyond the “Like”
- 5 Masterminds Redefining Social Media Marketing

Image courtesy of Flickr, Brandi Sims

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Self-strengthening polymer nanocomposite works best under pressure

Rice University lab creates self-strengthening nanocomposite

Researchers at Rice University have created a synthetic material that gets stronger from repeated stress much like the body strengthens bones and muscles after repeated workouts.

Work by the Rice lab of Pulickel Ajayan, professor in mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry, shows the potential of stiffening polymer-based nanocomposites with carbon nanotube fillers. The team reported its discovery this month in the journal ACS Nano.

The trick, it seems, lies in the complex, dynamic interface between nanostructures and polymers in carefully engineered nanocomposite materials.

Brent Carey, a graduate student in Ajayan's lab, found the interesting property while testing the high-cycle fatigue properties of a composite he made by infiltrating a forest of vertically aligned, multiwalled nanotubes with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), an inert, rubbery polymer. To his great surprise, repeatedly loading the material didn't seem to damage it at all. In fact, the stress made it stiffer.

Carey, whose research is sponsored by a NASA fellowship, used dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) to test their material. He found that after an astounding 3.5 million compressions (five per second) over about a week's time, the stiffness of the composite had increased by 12 percent and showed the potential for even further improvement.

"It took a bit of tweaking to get the instrument to do this," Carey said. "DMA generally assumes that your material isn't changing in any permanent way. In the early tests, the software kept telling me, 'I've damaged the sample!' as the stiffness increased. I also had to trick it with an unsolvable program loop to achieve the high number of cycles."

Materials scientists know that metals can strain-harden during repeated deformation, a result of the creation and jamming of defects -- known as dislocations -- in their crystalline lattice. Polymers, which are made of long, repeating chains of atoms, don't behave the same way.

The team is not sure precisely why their synthetic material behaves as it does. "We were able to rule out further cross-linking in the polymer as an explanation," Carey said. "The data shows that there's very little chemical interaction, if any, between the polymer and the nanotubes, and it seems that this fluid interface is evolving during stressing."

"The use of nanomaterials as a filler increases this interfacial area tremendously for the same amount of filler material added," Ajayan said. "Hence, the resulting interfacial effects are amplified as compared with conventional composites.

"For engineered materials, people would love to have a composite like this," he said. "This work shows how nanomaterials in composites can be creatively used."

They also found one other truth about this unique phenomenon: Simply compressing the material didn't change its properties; only dynamic stress -- deforming it again and again -- made it stiffer.

Carey drew an analogy between their material and bones. "As long as you're regularly stressing a bone in the body, it will remain strong," he said. "For example, the bones in the racket arm of a tennis player are denser. Essentially, this is an adaptive effect our body uses to withstand the loads applied to it.

"Our material is similar in the sense that a static load on our composite doesn't cause a change. You have to dynamically stress it in order to improve it."

Cartilage may be a better comparison -- and possibly even a future candidate for nanocomposite replacement. "We can envision this response being attractive for developing artificial cartilage that can respond to the forces being applied to it but remains pliable in areas that are not being stressed," Carey said.

Both researchers noted this is the kind of basic research that asks more questions than it answers. While they can easily measure the material's bulk properties, it's an entirely different story to understand how the polymer and nanotubes interact at the nanoscale.

"People have been trying to address the question of how the polymer layer around a nanoparticle behaves," Ajayan said. "It's a very complicated problem. But fundamentally, it's important if you're an engineer of nanocomposites.

"From that perspective, I think this is a beautiful result. It tells us that it's feasible to engineer interfaces that make the material do unconventional things."

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HSN details Nook Color update for 'mid-April': Android 2.2, Flash, apps and push email

Spent some quality time watching the Home Shopping Network this morning to hear just how the Nook Color will be improved? That's what we thought... but we bit the bullet and tuned in ourselves to get the details for you. Simply put, HSN says Barnes and Noble will start rolling out an over-the-air software package in "mid-April" that will update the Nook Color to Android 2.2, bringing Adobe Flash Player, Angry Birds, and push email of some sort. It'll also apparently include "lots of Nook apps," though the channel's pitchmen only had one to show on TV -- a kid-friendly sketchpad, with a variety of drawing utensils and colored paper. HSN hosts also claim that customers who purchase the Nook Color on the show are "guaranteed to be the very first people updated," though we're not sure we'll take them at their word, considering some of the other fabulous exaggerations we just heard on the air.

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Google’s Robotic Recipe Search Favors SEO Over Good Food

Editor’s note: Guest writer Amanda Hesser is a cookbook author, co-founder of cooking community site Food52, and a food columnist for the New York Times.

The entity with the greatest influence on what Americans cook is not Costco or Trader Joe’s. It’s not the Food Network or The New York Times. It’s Google. Every month about a billion of its searches are for recipes. The dishes that its search engine turns up, particularly those on the first page of results, have a huge impact on what Americans cook. Which is why, with a recent change in its recipe search, Google has, in effect, taken sides in the food war. Unfortunately, it’s taken the wrong one.

In late February, when Google announced that it was adding a new kind of search, specifically for recipes, it seemed like good news for a site devoted to cooking—at last Google was shining its searchlight on content we deeply care about. But then came the bad news: once you get your new recipe results, you can refine the results in just 3 ways: by ingredient, by cooking time and by calories. While Google was just trying to improve its algorithm, thereby making the path to recipes easier and more efficient, it inadvertently stepped into the middle of the battle between the quick-and-easy faction and the cooking-matters group.

Before these new changes, Google recipe results favored sites with lots of content and good S.E.O. – e.g. AllRecipes and Food. Now, recipe results favor these sites, but also those with lots of additional metadata, such as ratings, calories, cooking times, and photos. Google is using this data in an honest attempt to find better recipes.

The problem is that this new search effectively prevents the thousands of excellent cooking sites and blogs from ever seeing the light of day. More importantly, those smaller sites and blogs are where much of the best work in food is happening online. Google recipe search now fails to deliver their promise of producing the most relevant results—because in recipes, the most relevant result is the best recipe.

Instead, its search engine gives vast advantage to the largest recipe websites with the resources to input all this metadata, and particularly those who home in on “quick and easy” and low calorie dishes. In so doing, Google unwittingly—but damagingly—promotes a cooking culture focused on speed and diets.

Take, for instance, a recent search for “cassoulet.” The top search result is a promising recipe from Epicurious, one of the larger and better sites. But if you refine by time, your choices are “less than 15 min,” “less than 30 min,” or “less than 60 min.” There is no option for more than 60 minutes. In truth, a classic cassoulet takes at least 4 hours to make, if not several days (the Epicurious recipe takes 4 hours and 30 minutes); yet there in the results are recipes under each of these three time classes. One from Tablespoon goes so far as to claim to take just 1 minute. (It’s made with kidney beans, canned mushrooms, and beef, so it’s not long on authenticity.)

If you refine by calories, you can even find two cassoulets that are purportedly fewer than 100 calories per person: the Lamb Shank Cassoulet from Good To Know contains a full lamb shank and sausage link per serving, yet is supposed to weigh in at just 77 calories a serving. No such dish exists unless the serving size is a pinch.

For something more mundane like fried chicken, a refinement of “less than 15 min” takes you to a recipe on Food that claims the total prep and cooking time is six minutes, even though the recipe itself tells you to bake it for 1 hour. Even if you do find a recipe that accurately claims a fast cooking time, how will you know it’s a good recipe? Refining recipe search by time doesn’t result in better recipes rising to the top; rather, the new winners are recipes packaged for the American eating and cooking disorder.

Google’s new approach is misguided even if sites don’t try to game it. What does cooking time really mean, anyway? What happens when you must marinate a dish for 24 hours? Do you count that as prep time or cooking time? The tradition of prep times began creeping into our cooking culture about 30 years ago with the rise of quick-cooking columns. They’ve long acted more as a marketing tool than as helpful information. The proliferation of cooking times has not only put pressure on writers to fudge times, but has encouraged editors to stop running recipes that take longer than an hour. Lost in the rankings will be such slow-build classics as paella and layer cakes.

Google must surely know that recipes are anything but precise formulas: they’re descriptive guides, and quality cannot be quantified in calories or time. The search engine’s real opportunity lies in understanding the metrics that actually reflect great quality. A simple place to start is by tracking the number of comments relative to pageviews, the number of Facebook likes a recipe has garnered, or how often a recipe has been shared. A recipe with 74 comments is almost certainly better than one that takes 8 minutes to make. (And at some point, Google should create its own system for calculating calories.)

I’m glad Google put effort into improving its recipe search, but their solution feels robotic rather than thoughtful. If they don’t change their current approach, I fear to contemplate the future of American cooking. As it stands, Google’s recipe search gives undue advantage to the “quick & easy” recipe sites, encourages dishonesty, and sets up people to be dissuaded from cooking, as they will soon learn that recipes always end up taking more time than they expected. Alas, the search algorithm fundamentally misunderstands what recipe searchers are really looking for: great recipes.

Photo credit: Sarah Shatz.

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