The Fluctuating Friend Phenomenon and Other Fantastic Facebook Failures

Facebook made news recently after yet another round of modifications to users’ profile pages. Along with this latest round of changes came the predictable outcries over privacy concerns--Facebook can’t even discuss the possibility of changing its logo without a massive user backlash and a frenzy of privacy complaints.

For the record, however, I viewed these privacy concerns as unwarranted from day one. Anyone with a pulse and the slightest concern for their online image can restrict access to a list of specific friends. Personally, I always enjoy watching a double-dip of stupidity. Isn't it fantastic that the same people who are stupid enough to engage in embarrassing behavior in front of a camera are equally ignorant when it comes to Facebook privacy settings?

Admittedly, I made a late arrival to the whole Facebook scene. The “old-timers” of the new online era will recall that Facebook began as a college-only website. Strangely enough, I didn’t join Facebook until the spring of 2006, the exact same day that I completed my last final exam in college. Shortly thereafter, Facebook added a new feature that set off one of the biggest user complaint sessions in the brief history of Facebook: the newsfeed, the page that now displays when you first log in to your account, listing all of the latest status updates, photo uploads, and other friends' activities.

While countless anti-newsfeed groups popped up and gained popularity all over Facebook, I was one of only three people to join an Iowa State University-specific, pro-newsfeed group called P.E.N.I.S. (People Enjoying Newsfeeds at Iowa State). To this day, I still can’t figure out why the group never achieved widespread popularity across the internet. I’ve always found Facebook’s privacy options more than adequate and easy to use, but surely there were more than two people on a campus of 20,000+ who shared my opinions on the subject.

Yet despite my support and general level of contentment with Facebook’s privacy settings, I have an entirely different set of complaints about Facebook’s functionality. For a company that's valued in the billions of dollars, that has turned a huge Harvard nerd into one of the richest people in the country, and has revolutionized both social media and the traditional marketing business, the company has what I consider many obvious shortcomings.


First, there’s the design of the friend list. Despite all of the changes to the design and layout of Facebook’s profile pages, one thing that has remained nearly constant since the early days is the familiar “plus one” logo that appears along with the phrase “You and (whoever) are now friends” when you make a new friend connection on Facebook:


Ahh, the “plus one” update. Easy to understand? Yes. Familiar? Yes. Useful information? Not at all. As a Facebook user, a message telling me that I’m now friends with someone is about as useful as being updated on the current weather conditions in my area while I'm standing outdoors. After all, I either sent the friend request to begin with, or I just clicked the “Accept” button, which prompted the +1 to show up. I’d be more interested in receiving a piece of information that Facebook doesn’t currently offer—a “minus one” update.

This idea first came to me one day while I admired my friend count after a story on the ten o’clock news. The reporter claimed that there is an optimal number of Facebook friends, a “sweet spot” of social network friendliness, if you will. That magic number was 300 friends. Anything less than that meant that you are a lonely, pathetic loser, and anything above 300 meant that you’re a fake, desperate wannabe who will friend anything with a pulse.

Of course, since social status means the world to me, I immediately logged in to my Facebook account to check my friend count. My homepage confirmed what I had suspected all along: I was essentially perfect: 299 friends. Out of curiosity, I checked James’s friend counter: nearly 1,200. Ouch...I guess we know what that means… That little experiment was proof enough for me that this news reporter knew what he was talking about.

Over the next few weeks, every time I logged in to my account, I glanced admiringly at my friend counter. But I was caught off guard one day when my friend counter read 298—how did it go down?! This unexpected loss of friendship, even though I had no idea who I had lost as a friend, left me riddled with insecurity and self-doubt. But later in the week, the friend counter had climbed just over 300, and during this entire stretch of time, I hadn’t sent or accepted a single friend request.

A few days later, I was back down to 299. What was going on? Sure, I was still hovering near the bullseye of perfection, but I found it alarming that unbeknownst to me, I was occasionally losing (and sometimes regaining) friends, all without a single informative message from Facebook. Unable to deal with the tremendous self-loathing and general insecurity, I devised a plan to solve this mystery.

I clicked to view my full friend list, copied the entire list of names, and pasted it into an Excel spreadsheet, the best friend a finance person could ask for. (If it were socially acceptable, I would publish this blog in one giant spreadsheet). Every day, I checked my friend list, and if the total changed, I could use a favorite old Excel trick, the VLOOKUP formula, to quickly pinpoint who had appeared, or disappeared, from my friend list. The instant I came up with the plan, I knew I had a potentially blog-worthy story on my hands. If someone un-friended me, I would confront the perpetrator with a strongly worded, though still non-confrontational, Facebook message. The endless possibility for drama gave my little social experiment all the appeal of an Internet soap opera.

Over the next few weeks, I gleaned some interesting insights from my spreadsheet sleuthing. As I had originally suspected, the fluctuating friend phenomenon that I had been witnessing had two causes: people activating and deactivating their Facebook accounts, and people simply de-friending me. I noticed that my cousin had de- and re-activated her account a few times, which was odd, but not particularly interesting. But I came across two people—an old college friend and a co-worker—who still had active accounts, but our previous Facebook friendship had for some reason been severed. I wasn’t about to back down, so I moved into phase two of my plan: the confrontation.

I sent a friend request to each of those former Facebook friends, accompanied by a message asking why they had de-friended me. I hadn’t talked to either one in at least a year…we weren’t exactly the closest friends, obviously, but by the same token, the lack of communication meant that I hadn’t even had the opportunity to say or do anything offensive that would warrant the end of an otherwise healthy Facebook friendship. I anxiously awaited their responses, which, I felt certain, would provide me with pure blog-worthy gold.

The results of my experiment were spectacular…ly disappointing. One friend accepted my friend request within minutes and sent me a message, apologizing and explaining that her account had somehow gotten messed up and she lost her friend connections with a bunch of people. Hardly scandalous. And the former coworker simply ignored my friend request. To this day, I continue to sit in Facebook friend limbo with that coworker, unsure if it was an account error or if she simply decided to downsize her friend list, leaving my friendship on the cutting room floor.

So, as it turned out, my bold social experiment fizzled to a boring dead-end and turned out to be an impressive waste of time. But while carrying out my experiment, I logged in to Facebook much more frequently that I ever had in the past, and I realized that Facebook’s failure to inform people of lost friendship was only one weakness on one of the world’s most popular websites.

After logging in day after day, I realized that the newsfeed, the feature for which I had so publicly expressed my appreciation when I joined P.E.N.I.S. several years ago, was starting to get on my nerves. I enjoy the real time updates, but I was genuinely sick of reading everyone’s wall posts, which mainly consisted of people bragging about their personal accomplishments or fishing for compliments. Worse yet, one "friend" took it upon herself to share the trashy details as the sad saga of her failing marriage, unplanned pregnancy, and fleeing husband unfolded before the public's eyes. If I wanted this kind of news, I would call in sick and spend the afternoon watching low-brow courtroom reality TV.


It was at this time that I realized that Facebook could put an end to this annoying, pervasive issue with a simple twist on its revolutionary “Like” button. These days, every webpage has a “Like” button on it somewhere. It's become so commonplace that the “Like” button is revolutionizing the entire online advertising industry, allowing marketers to target ads at an audience with very specific interests. In fact, the “Like” button is one of the main reasons that Facebook is valued well into the billions of dollars.


But where’s the “Dislike” button?! Every time I log in, I can find at least 10 different wall posts that thoroughly deserve a “Dislike.” Yet my only options are to "Like" or to post a comment…and since posting a negative comment directly on someone’s wall post would be downright rude, I end up doing nothing.

As much as I’d like to take credit for it, the “Dislike” idea is far from revolutionary. Even Yahoo, which industry experts have long considered the elderly, uncool grandfather of the web, has a similar feature. In the comments section below Yahoo News stories, users can give either a thumbs up or thumbs down rating for a particular comment. If a comment receives too many downward-pointing thumbs, it gets hidden from the site and replaced by “Comment hidden due to low rating.” How great is that? The setup allows society to tell a person that their idea sucks so bad that it deserves to be kicked off the Internet, a place where anyone can post anything! Seems like a fantastic idea to me!

Better yet—and this is where I throw my own brilliant hat into the ring—the Internet desperately needs an “Indifferent” button. Let’s face it, there are times when you want someone to know you read what they wrote, but you just plain don’t care. You may not find their statement particularly annoying nor particularly valuable, so it’s worth dropping them a line and saying, “I read it, but I really don’t think it was worth my time.” (Not unlike this blog post, perhaps). If nothing else, the “Indifferent” button will gently pressure offending wall posters to raise the quality and thoughtfulness of their postings.

Just like that, over a span of just a few weeks, I found three glaring opportunities. For a company worth several billion dollars, I figure a “minus one” logo and the addition of “Indifferent” and “Dislike” buttons has gotta be worth at least $500 million. Mark Zuckerberg, if you’re reading this, you can post something in the comments section if you'd like to request an address where you can send my check.

Note: In the spirit of full disclosure, I regrettably admit that after writing this blog post, I stumbled upon a website describing a new Facebook app called "Unfriend Finder" that automatically does what my maze of Excel spreadsheets did for me. That's right, my idea wasn't as original as I first thought. Worse yet, the author of this website, Prateek Bansal, not only stole my idea, but he created an application to solve the great Facebook mystery. It felt like the GMAT all over, being outperformed by a foreigner. It would have been great to know that my idea was already floating around the internet before taking the time to write this blog post...

Don't you hate it when someone steals your ideas before you even have a chance to come up with them? (For the record, though, the article was posted in June, months after I had come up with the idea for this blog post and started keeping track of the changes in my friend list. So, good 'ol Prateek beat me to the punch in publishing his piece. But I've still got him on the "Dislike" and "Indifferent" buttons...