Tipping point: Online Services v popularity

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Why is it that the more popular you are as an online service and/or application, the less you can change?  Does this have anything to do with the fact that as you rack up million after million of users, you start to find that you have run out of technical users and start to be working with the common non-geek?  Or as I like to say, the real people.  (I don't really, I am just trying to appeal to a wider audience...)

We are living in interesting times, and I'm not talking about how millions of people worldwide are going to be affected by an economic depression.  Rather, how millions of people worldwide are going to be affected by Facebook's interface change.  Out of all the things going wrong in this crazy world, why is it that I hear Facebook devotees screaming the loudest?

My first thought is that they need to just get a life!  I don't have a problem with the changes, in fact I like to see the services I use change and evolve, and it isn't as if we are paying for most of these services.  But maybe my feelings come from the tech side of my brain, where I have been slowly trained to pay for the good stuff.. (yes I do!  most of the time....)

What with Facebook changing, and the news of the paid Twitter accounts, it is certainly creating storms of protest.  It's not just a storm in a teacup either.  To be as popular as the Facebook is, you have to start moving away from geek/techie market and branch into teen culture, mums, dads and celebrities.  The problem with these markets is that they have certain expectations as to the stability of the services they use.  Those expectations can go along the lines of "use said service until you out grow it, then move onto something new", or "if I'm going to take the time to learn this new thing, I'm only going to be doing it once."

I sometimes wonder if online technology is following the will of the users, or if the users are being prodded along in technology's wake, with no choice but to keep running after it.  Maybe if we stopped running, we would find that we didn't want to go that direction anyway.

Facebook is going to be an interesting case as time goes on.  Today we are seeing many of the old school stable institutions going away and/or being replaced by online services.  So as the importance of the new online versions starts to reach beyond geeks, and breaks into the mainstream (ie. Ebay and Craig's List), changing and turning these supertankers of information is going to become harder and harder.

We all know that most of the issues with Vista were to do with the big changes in the look and feel of the OS.  Are we destined to repeat this history?  Or can we break this cycle and embrace the fluidness that the Internet allows us?

Jason Remnant

If it's popular, break it...

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