Has Facebook Lost Its Vision?

I can’t help but notice Facebook’s shift from a product-driven to overly market-driven culture despite making a ton of impressive, game-changing innovations early on:

• News Feed - The now common news feed is probably the most impactful UX innovation in social networking to date, creating a much easier interface for consuming and engaging with friends.
• Beacon - Although killed with lawsuits, Beacon was an innovative way to make purchases social and ahead of its time.
• Platform/API’s - So freakin’ smart. Facebook shaped the face of Web 2.0 while giving developers the tools to build its success. This is why Facebook dominates today.
• Like Button - Now embedded on millions of websites, the Like button is a constant re-engagement tool but more importantly, a super-clever tracking tool to improve their ad targeting.
• Technology - Facebook’s ability to rapidly release new features and scale to over 750 million monthly users is incredible.

More recently, it seems any feature release is chasing the next hot trend with no significant differentiation:

• Questions (July, 2010) a la Quora, Aardvark
• Places (August, 2010) a la Foursquare, Gowalla
• Deals (January, 2011) a la Groupon, LivingSocial
• Messenger (August 2011) a la Beluga, GroupMe, Kik
• Smart Lists (September, 2011) a la Google+
• Subscribe (September, 2011) a la Google+, Twitter

With more on the way (stay tuned for next week’s F8 conference):

• Photo Sharing Mobile App (more info) a la Instagram
• Mobile Gaming Ecosystem, aka Project Spartan (more info) a la Apple

This rapid replication is partly responsible for Facebook’s awful Frankenstein of features and inconsistent UI’s. It’s confusing.

(On a positive note, they’re at least not afraid to kill features such as Deals. Facebook needs to do this more often. As David Karp, founder of Tumblr says, “For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don’t do that, and it’s a problem.”)

I applaud Facebook’s ability to quickly replicate business models and features but Zuckerberg and team needs to take a step back and think hard about how it fits into their strategy and user experience.