I recently read a great article about how Facebook ships code and what their values and practices are. It revolves around a list of different examples of how Facebook encourages and fosters an environment of innovation and productivity.
Basically, the article doesn’t say if it’s good or bad, but does describe how very, very developer-centric the company is. Essentially, developers are given ultimate freedom and are basically treated as though the are infallible (other than were they to do something malicious or were not performing, they would be let go).
There is little to no oversight or thought given about priorities at Facebook or what is a “good” idea.
As a developer, I would love to be given ultimate freedom to work on what I think is important or cool or beneficial. Though, while that may be a good thing goal, you can easily start to not see the forest for the trees. Facebook has repeatedly gotten itself in trouble this way, just Google “Facebook privacy concerns,” and you’ll have more than enough results from many different time periods and over many different issues.
This is where working too fast without planning or stopping to consider exactly the consequences before going ahead with new features can easily come back to bite you. While ultimate freedom and power is great, oversight is something that can never be overlooked or forgotten.
Recently, I was discussing the recent changes to Facebook with them adding Facebook Places to their functionality on my friend, Russ Phillip’s Buzz feed, I added this comment:
What really happens with Foursquare, and will more than likely be the case, is that the people who check in are going to check in 5+ times a day are going to be 80% of the check-ins.
What Facebook has going for them is that other people are actually going to see those check-ins regardless of whether or not those other people are checking in as well.
While people are still very wary of check-in services (privacy, etc), I think that this broadcasting on someone’s Facebook newsfeed will quickly make people quickly adopt it. Either that, or it’s going to flop.
Facebook had a major win when they added pictures and applications, but there have been failures as well, like marketplace and gifts. In this case, I think either it’s going to be a major win or a total gimmick that people don’t use.
Regardless, Facebook definitely made the right move in adding geolocation services – with their already established, and more importantly, connected userbase, they have the biggest opportunity to make something out of it by far.
I wanted to elaborate on that and give some more information, so here it is…
Geolocation is clearly going to be a big development in web applications and software. And just like any new development, no one can really know if it’s going to be the “next big thing” or not. Similarly, no one knows exactly how to properly tap the next big development and ride that wave. People do it all the time, but there are plenty of people who miss the opportunity, or take the wrong approach.
Facebook is ensuring that they’re at least going to have a presence. There’s no guarantee of them being a dominant presence, or even a market leader. They are taking steps to make sure they’re there when something happens, however. And that is the best and smartest step they can take right now.
