Over the weekend I was re-organizing my home office and came across Steve Krug’s book entitled “don’t make me think” – a common sense approach to web usability.

The usability team (assuming there is one) at facebook should make this mandatory reading before implementing their next interface update.

The basic premise of the book is that websites that are the most usable are the ones where the user’s natural intuition is sufficient to navigate through a site and find what they are looking for. Overly designed or function driven interfaces generally fail basic usability tests.

The facebook team has been so concerned about the rising popularity of twitter that they’ve updated your home page to mimic the flow and constant update feed that twitter has.  They’ve even changed the status bar to say “What’s on your mind” and changed the publish button to say “share.”

I like the core idea of making your facebook homepage a “lifestream” of all your friends activities that is updated live. Facebook’s “social graph” means there is inherently richer & deeper content to stream and given they already have critical mass the move was a smart one given twitter’s rising popularity.

What i don’t like is that there is no focus on the landing page.

Facebook recently updated their social ad system (the little ads on the right pane) to incorporate events and other friend activity – including friend suggestions. By sandwiching social ads with relevant updates from your social graph, they hoped to increase clickthrough rates of their ads as they are still among the poorest performing in the industry.  They now call this section “Highlights.”

Highlights on their own and in the context of the previous homepage design was a neat idea – but in the context of the current site design, all we get is clutter, a loss of focus and a loss of visual hierarchy.

Although it’s neat that I can now self-select other feeds to add to my facebook live stream (like flickr, youtube, delicious,digg etc…), it would have been more user friendly to incorporate these personalization options in the left navigation pane on the home page instead of hiding them on my personal page under settings.

Interested in interface design and usability? Here are a few other books I’ve dusted off this weekend that are worth a read:

• Web reDesign 2.0 – Workflow that works by Kelly Goto & Emily Cotler
• Information Architecture for the web – Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville
• Designing Interfaces – Jenifer Tidwell
• TOG on Interface – Tognazzini (an oldie & but still relevant one from my interface design days at Cornell)

The highlight for me yesterday at CTIA was the keynote address from Yahoo executive Vice President Marco Boerries where he announced the introduction of Yahoo! oneConnect for the iphone.

The live demo demonstrated how this new application (optimized for the iphone) takes your address book and makes it social by aggregating all your mobile messaging via IM and SMS and all your lifestream feeds into one amazing interface.

Like friendfeed and Social Thing, you can add myspace, last.fm,dopplr,twitter, friendster, bebo,flickr,youtube and facebook feeds to oneConnect under their Pulse feature. You can now scan what is happening across all networks from one mobile interface.  This also means you can update your status in one place and have all your other streams automatically updated.

Users will also be able to track their contacts on a single screen, with information on their status and the ability to quickly call or send an IM or email.

The application is available for free in the app store – although it wasn’t indexing yet on their search tool. If you are having problems finding it, go to mobile.yahoo.com/oneconnect/iphone and click on the app link. This will bring you into the app store for immediate download.

I’ve spent some time on it so far, but I’m afraid of the roaming charges associated with customizing it right now, so look for additional perspective later.

Yahoo plans on releasing versions for other platforms, but it’s hard to imagine how they’ll be able to create a comparable experience on other platforms.

Just as marketers are finally figuring out what the heck facebook is and why they should be embracing the platform as a way of reaching & engaging their customers and potential customers, there is a new trend developing that may impact facebook and other social mediums…

Enter social aggregators.

Aggregators won’t replace facebook – but much like RSS feeds have supplemented users visting websites directly, social aggregator services could mean marketers looking to reach and engage people through social media sites like facebook will find a smaller direct audience to engage with.

I’ve signed up with socialthing and others are raving about feedfriend. Both do about the same thing – they take updates from all your social media sites like flickr, facebook, twitter, yelp, linkedin and stream them as one interface in something called a “lifestream.”

The idea is great – instead of checking for updates on multiple sites, you can get them all at once – much like how i use Netvibes or Protopage to aggregate all my RSS feeds.

Personally I get everything I need from Netvibes. 

I can add twitter or facebook status updates to Netvibes… and i don’t really care for the extra features social aggregators include such as comments on the different feeds. When I also consider the fact that most of my friends aren’t as geeked out as I am on ‘web 2.0′, it makes even less sense. Just getting my friends on facebook was a monumental task.

Having said that, the mobile interface for Socialthing is a thing of beauty.

They also have an optimized interface for the iphone which makes checking out lifestreams on the go a pleasant experience.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with my RSS feeds (270 currently) – I’m not sure I have enough time (or care enough) to follow the lifestream of every person i know. Having said that, it could be really useful if you are stalking following a few choice people…

How can marketers get in on this?

Websites got around a similar issue when RSS feeds became popular by not including all the content in the feed – so users who liked the lead content were driven back to the site… where sponsored ads could be displayed in all their glory.

One suggestion – build your own branded social aggregator…. and include your own relevant content as one of the feeds.

I could see this working really well for Automotive, Financial, Pharma, Retail… well pretty much any brand looking to participate in & influence a person’s lifestream.

A few months ago I blogged about the impact of facebook on traditional print media. 

Many promoters had stopped printing flyers and started leveraging the power of the social graph available through facebook in order to reach and promote their events.

As reported by Yahoo last week, Yahoo is poised for hundreds of layoffs this week as advertising revenue has dropped significantly. 

Social Media sites have become everything Yahoo used to be – but simpler.  And easier. And more open.

Marketers have followed consumers to popular social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It would appear that facebook has moved on from eating the print shop’s lunch to eating the lunch of Web 1.0 sites.

Who’s next?

Social Media has really evolved over the last 12 months. 

Arguably it started when facebook opened up their platform to developers.  

The number of applications went from 8 to hundreds within weeks and the level of user engagement increased and accelerated.  

Many other major social media sites followed facebook’s lead and announced plans to open up their platform too… most notably Google’s Open Social announcement near the end of the year which had the promise of portability of applications and widgets across multiple platforms.

Many other sites that were struggling to match the pace of facebook’s growth declared that they would also join Open Social so that collectively they could change the landscape of social media once again (maybe this time in their favour).  

There was just one major barrier 

facebook’s social graph meant that people would not easily or quickly leave facebook for another platform – not after investing so much time and effort into creating networks and connecting to friends, family and colleagues. 

As blogged on this site (see links below), it’s unlikely that consumers will abandon or share their online social media time with facebook until their data assets built within facebook became portable to other sites. 

Enter dataportability.org 

Their philosophy is that you own your own data – so you should have the right to do with it as you see fit…like export or port it to another platform, tool, or application. Check out their mission statement here. 

As of now, the group is no more than a round table of smart people looking for a way to materialize a vision…. but what’s interesting is who has joined the round table discussion.  As of today, key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart, Google, facebook and Twitter have joined the conversation.

If this turns out to be more than a PR stunt, this has the potential to be the biggest story of 2008 as true identity portability means we can take our social equity and use it however we see fit – and where ever.

That’s what I’d call Social Media 2.0

Or Identity 2.0

Whatever you want to call it – this is a significant signal that the digital social media space will continue to evolve at a rapid pace this year and we all stand to benefit from this.  

Need to catch up on the conversation? Here are links to some of my previous articles that referenced portability of identity and identity 2.0:  

• Identity 2.0 – where does it begin?
• Open Social not cause for open celebreation….yet