Does technology need to solve everything?

I needed soup. I was coughing, sneezing and dying a slow death called body ache. I needed something warm, something soothing. A few moments of relief. Soup.

It was my first year away from home. I had never bought packaged soup before. What I bought was trash. Desperation. All I could do now was Whatsapp a friend. ‘Dude, any restaurant in the vicinity that serves good soup?’

He said ‘Why would you want to order soup from a restaurant. Go to the Supermarket and get soup brand X. Trust Me’.

Good soup procured and the rest was history.

So yesterday when I read about a start-up providing social recommendations for shopping, I totally saw myself as a user. Recommendations from your close friends sometimes make all the difference. Even for something as mundane as soup.

The product was simple. Users keep recommending products that they feel are worth recommending. Using your Facebook data, the system figured out whose opinion mattered to you so that when you needed recommendations, you’d have them at your fingertips.

Great! Sounds like a plan.

Genuine need. All the right pieces of Technology — Mobile apps on all platforms for easy access, Social Mining to find people who matter and finally a platform which is time-persistent to record recommendations and provide them on-demand. Technology solves everything. Yay!

So now I need to buy a new-T-shirt. Friends, what be your recommendations?

Wait. Why would any of my friends keep adding recommendations to this service?

In real-life friends help-out each other because ‘They Care’. When you give them a call or text them, they do their best because they genuinely want to help you out. How do you translate ‘Genuine Care’ to a functionality?

How do you make caring an app-based incentive? Why would a user spend time recommending products on a third party service without any immediate needs or gains? We can always give them coupons but then we have enough of those anyways.

Secondly, when you need recommendations, who would you get it from?

Probably this friend who knows about where all the offers are. Or maybe that friend who has those ‘Superhero T-shirts’. Or maybe that friend who has the same shopping budget as you.

How do you translate these to code? How do you record a user noticing a superhero T-shirt that some friend wore a couple of weeks back and use it to provide recommendations?

Sure Facebook has a lot of data about your friends and acquaintances. Pinterest knows the people whose collections you like. But the way we seek recommendations is more impulsive and intuitive than what data can currently model today.

And lastly, how do we actually seek these recommendations?

Do we like just ask a friend for some store names and then hang-up?

Nope. The process is much more than that. It starts with your friend asking you why you need something, what your criteria is and maybe how much you are willing to spend. After you've answered these, your friend makes tailored recommendations for your needs and then goes on to add some extra goodness like which brands to watch out for, which tailor to insist for and some real good advice to drop a criteria or to increase/decrease the budget.

Social recommendations the way we seek them today are much more conversational in nature than just reading a page full of information. It’s better to give your friend a call than going through 30 pages of information in the name of recommendations. It’s a no brainer that a call or text messaging is the way to go.

When I think of such questions, I realize that our ways of doing some things are much more intuitive than technology can offer.

Maybe some problems should be left alone.

Sometimes, the best way is the old school way.

Facebook can't be too many things at once

‘Dude,What’s this Facebook which everybody keeps talking about?’. ‘Man you don’t know about Facebook?! It’s awesome! It’s kinda like Orkut, but only much much better!’ - This was 2008

Since then, what Facebook meant to us has changed a time too many. Facebook went from being the new fad to the new buzzword to the new redundant. Soothsayers are already queuing up to forecast it’s death.

But how did it get here? Why is something as addictive and successful as Facebook being now treated as terminal? What did Facebook do wrong?

Let me tell you - ‘Nothing much’!

Facebook is a medium which derives it’s meaning from the content we create on it. It provides a set of tools and thrives purely by how people use them. Facebook is a slave to human behavior.

We changed Facebook and what it meant to us.And our behavior which led us to change Facebook isn't something new at all.

We rather demonstrate this very same behavior, subconsciously, at any large gathering that we attend. Let’s take a reunion. Pick any big reunion.

Stage 1 - When you’re there at first, you meet so many folks - friends and acquaintances that you've simply lost touch with. It’s so great to see them after so many years! You ask them how they've been and how life has turned out for them since the last time you met them. Your friend is more than happy to tell you that life has gone really well for him over all these years. He’s going to tell you about which college he attended, how he traveled all over the country, how he has a really cute dog and how he’s really into cricket. It’s great to know all this about your friend after so many years.

These are Facebook’s initial days. People were just thrilled to add their long lost friends and acquaintances on Facebook. Adding more friends was more fun and checking out their status updates and photos was super exciting. You found it great to know that friend A is totally into Football or that friend B has totally hot girlfriend and that friend C now goes to a top business school.

Back at the reunion, your friends keep telling you more about themselves and after a point,it gets boring. You’re not interested in the cake served at his brother’s wedding and how he found the icing delicious or how he loves his neighborhood so very much. You’re dying to excuse yourself from the discussion.

In Facebookland, this is when you started to feel that people kept talking about themselves all the time on Facebook and how their status updates are so annoying. You wanted to stare at an update and say ‘So what?!’

Stage 2 - Now at the reunion, you’re bored. You’re willing to participate in only those discussions which are about topics that you like or on which you have something to share. Bunch of blokes are standing at one end talking about the English Premier League while a group of folks on the other end are discussing ‘The Big Bang Theory’. I like Big Bang theory. You sway into the discussion and start talking about how Penny is really hot! You’re friends agree and then you all laugh on the C-men joke!

You see, the discussions now, have moved on from people to ‘Content’.

This is exactly what we started to do on Facebook. Sharing memes and status updates about Game of Thrones, Manchester United, Lokpal Movement, Calvin and Hobbes were the in thing! We usually found ourselves liking, commenting and sharing content which we liked. On some days, I felt Facebook had suddenly turned into 9GAG overnight. Facebook was entertaining again.

But here’s the catch - Facebook wasn't built for these kind of interactions. It was actually built for the initial ones. Other networks which were built for such interactions started to pop-up. Twitter and Quora introduced new ways to share and create content. Our friends were merely guides to access more content which we found interesting. They had a strong follow-unfollow model to help us maintain a curated list of sources as not all friends share our interests.

So Facebook did what it could. It tried to create and tweak more tools to facilitate this model of interaction. It brought in the ‘Share’ button, Hyperlink Previews and the app model which Quora adopted. It even went as far as adopting the ‘Follow-Unfollow’ model from Twitter. Facebook tweaked its algorithms to display content which we found relevant. It worked to some extent.

What it couldn't do was get people to unlearn how they used Facebook. In our minds, we had processed Facebook as a place we share personal updates. Although we were annoyed by people talking about themselves, we wouldn't hesitate to do the same ourselves. We would hesitate to unfriend somebody on Facebook as easily as unfollowing them on Twitter. The two meant different things to us.

What we ended up with is a Facebook which was still noisy and a patch work of sorts.

Stage 3 - Coming back to our reunion, discussions about ‘The Big Bang Theory’ have now moved to ‘How I met your mother’ (Ugh! That show!) and discussions about Wimbeldon have moved on to ‘Federer is the greatest player of all time’ (Yawn!) . ‘Hey guys, I’m going to make a move. Great talking to you all!’.

After many such discussions gone awry, all you want to do is settle-up in a booth or a corner with a bunch of close pals. Now you've moved on to discussions which you only have with your close friends. They know you better than most and you’re going to be chatting about stuff to which only these friends have context or access.

This is where we are today. ‘Whatsapp groups are the new social networks today’. How else do I explain 10 different groups on my Whatsapp list?

With media sharing, these interactions have only gotten better. We had such interactions on our ‘Facebook Group’ for some time but we dumped it in favor of a Whatsapp group which is more real-time and hence, better suited for such interactions.

To facilitate these interactions, Facebook will have to more than tweak itself and hope people unlearn what Facebook means to them in a big way. 

So what does this mean?

Does it mean that Facebook is going to be extinct soon?

Not in the near future. There is some value in our lives to the first kind of interactions and for it, there is no substitute to Facebook. Facebook is the only network where all your friends and acquaintances are and will continue to be.

What it means is that Facebook isn't going to be as popular as it once was. But it isn't Facebook’s fault completely either. It can’t be too many things at once.