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Why aren't we seeing newer products at Facebook?

  • In the years prior to their IPO, Facebook released new major products at an incredible rate. Many of these products were built while the company still had just a few hundred employees and it was common to hear Facebook employees bragging about their small teams and quick release cycles. To name a few: 1. The FB API & Connect 2. Like & Share Buttons 3. Chat 4. Tons and tons of redesigns 5. Facebook Places Despite massive growth in the number of people working at Facebook, the rate of new product and feature releases seems to have slowed dramatically. (4,900 employees as of March 31, 2013. A 30% increase in 12 months). In fact, if you look at Facebook's official timeline, the only features released within the last 7 months have been Graph Search (Jan 15) and Facebook Home for Android (April 12). Source : http://newsroom.fb.com/Timeline So what's going on? Has Facebook become too big or too risk averse for their own good?

  • Answer:

    In short, lower hanging fruit. Many of the things you cite are natural functions for a social network. Chat, an API to allow extensibility, location sharing. Those problems are narrower in scope than the larger, more challenging problems we've set out to tackle in 2013. Things like: 1) Driving Internet adoption in the third world (http://internet.org) 2) Reimagining how people interact with their mobile devices (Facebook Home) 3) Trying to index and make available all of our data at moments notice (Graph Search) We have in fact launched another redesign this year. https://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed From an insider's point of view, it doesn't *feel* like we've slowed down pace, but the size of our ecosystem and our ambitions has grown since the middle of last year. Even though we're a larger company, we're still greatly in need of the talented people that can help us realize our goals. It's still an uphill battle, there's still so much to be done. Facebook Home should show you we're not risk averse. But there is a gulf at times between releasing fast and releasing high quality. We could ship faster but there would be more bugs. Our monthly release cadence of our mobile apps aims for a happy medium between the two. More hands doesn't necessarily translate into speed, it can easily mean more confusion and less consistency. Scaling a site and culture like Facebook is difficult, but I believe our primary strength is learning and adapting, from the current thousands of employees to the future tens of thousands.

Matt Kulka at Quora Visit the source

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Because every Facebook engineer is facebooking all day long, every day!  ;-) Seriously though, Facebook is like an iceberg.  What you see on Facebook is just the tip of that iceberg.  The back-end infrastructure required to support the constantly growing scale of Facebook is the unseen 90% of the iceberg underwater: invisible because when it works, you never notice it. There are plenty of open-source Twitter and Facebook "clones" on github that you can set up on a single webserver, with a single database to back it, and it works great.  Or more complex ones w/ noSQL backends that scale better.  But these toy-"clones" fail at scaling to support more than few hundred concurrent users (or more for the noSQL backends).  Either your DB server is pegged on disk IO with a drive head completely saturated with seeks all over a spinning platter (your HDD), or your webserver CPU is pegged while generating dynamically computed response pages for all your users.  Or your network is saturated with so many images being shuffled among servers. Scaling is hard, because complexity is hard to control when monolithic systems are split to form distributed systems.  (Divide and conquer.)  A lot of creative energy is required to solve these scaling problems. If you look at the facebook engineering blog @ https://www.facebook.com/Engineering it's mostly infrastructure-ish projects, and lots of data-analytics projects.  If that's a sort of proxy for the kind of innovation that is needed at Facebook, then it makes sense that most of the innovation at facebook is in that submerged 90%, the part just under the surface- invisible but essential to support the apex of the 'berg- the user experience. Will Facebook release a lot of "newer products"?  You can count on it.  There are just too many superbly talented engineers at Facebook to imagine otherwise.

Will Pierce

You do realize that Facebook Graph Search and Facebook Home on Android are behemoth projects, right? And not only that, they've redesigned the news feed and it's slowly being rolled out to users. As a public company they're expected to make money for their shareholders, and so they've been giving some attention to Pages and Insights as well.

Gokul Nath Sridhar

I'd like to appropriately rephrase the question from "What's going on at Facebook?" to Why has innovation at Facebook slowed? or Why aren't we seeing newer products at Facebook? I'd like to turn it over to the OP and ask you: What sort of product do you want? (And honestly, I see more complaints about new features than compliments. The experience is diminishing.) More features is not better. In fact, I think less is more, at least for a social network. I think what's "going on" is that Facebook is having an identity crisis. Consequently, Facebook users are also sort of questioning Facebook. What is Facebook? What do people use it for? Is Facebook just a social network? Is Facebook also a search company? (Graph Search) Is Facebook also a content company? (Instagram) Is Facebook a maps company? (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-24/google-said-to-consider-buying-waze-presaging-bidding-war.html) Is Facebook an advertisement company? I think why innovation has slowed is because Facebook defines itself as a social network. I think we're headed into a future of a fragmented social network, meaning we will get to choose the platform for the fragment of the social network. A photo social network (Instagram). A status social network (Twitter). A video social network (Instagram/Vine). A hobby social network (Tumblr). Et cetera. We have niches for different things. Because honestly, on behalf of most Facebook users, we don't want to see photos, statuses, videos, hobbies from all of our friends. We want to see photos of some but not from others. We want to see videos from some but not from others. These fragments of social networks are making it more and more personal and the user experience and engagement -- what matters most -- is improved, especially now that we live in an attention economy. A solution I propose: Streamline lists feature -- while keeping the main news feed, we also want to separate people into different feeds and different content. Yea, lists are already there. But it's not something immediately we do. Make the process more efficient. Right now we have to go to someone's profile and then add them to a list. We can't even make a list on the news feed page right now. Perhaps integrate groups with lists (they are very different things right now). And onto separating content, where did the photos feed go? Newsfeed page shows 'Photos' on the left but it just shows my photos. Also, why does Facebook sort of neglect video? (On a side note, instead of just thinking about how we just connect to our friends, also think about how we connect to the larger global community. There's subscriptions. There's Instagram of course. And now there's non-mobile hashtag. But how about a live feed? Perhaps partnering up with http://meetup.com or develop something similar to it. Because after all,"Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.") Click here for a surprise: http://www.facebook.com/mission — Thoughts from a Facebook UX Researcher reject

Anonymous

In addition to other answers you have to also consider, it has to spend significant resources and time developing its monetization infrastructure and products for its customers

Nitin Bhartiya

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