Usability Yes. Social Features, Uh-Oh.

Thanks Philippe. I remain skeptical. I doubt that a dozen well-reasoned and well-researched criticisms could stop the organizational inertia that is behind social networking. But I still found your post somewhat reassuring, and I know this job is hard.

That said, I don't want to stand in the way of social networking. Maybe if resources are finite. But if other priorities are taken care of, I'm okay with social networking. My concern is making sure that the foundation does it right.

I think a big part of that really is making sure that we're very selective about how group features are used, since group misconduct is actually a big part of the problem that our research identified. The other part is focusing on other aspects of social networking (e.g.: profile pages, cleaner one-to-one communication, cleaner ways to follow your friends...).