Do What You Love: Patience and Passion

Awesome video from the Web 2.0 conference.

“There’s way too many people in this room right now that are doing stuff they hate.  Please stop doing that!”

President Bush on the Bailout

I watched President Bush’s bailout from last night and then read through the transcript just because I wasn’t sure I could believe what I was hearing. I’ll admit up front that I’m pretty conservative fiscally and very liberal socially (I usually fall into the Libertarian side). I love free markets and capitalism and classic Republican ideals like small government, low taxes, high business incentives, etc. (read: NOT George Bush and Company). I’m not an expert by any means in finance or markets, but I know some things and I’ve tried to keep really up to date/well-versed with the current financial crisis. Here are some parts of his speech that I found particularly memorable in bold with my thoughts written below:

New Facebook and the College Pulse

I always talk about how important it is to be close to the consumer — to really live and breath your market. Luckily for me as CEO of a social application company, I currently attend a University and have college kids around me all day. Facebook was born out of a core college demographic. So it was interesting that I just logged into Facebook and here are the 3 most recent status updates from my friends (I’m pretty much exclusively friends with people I know or have at least met):

[name deleted] is hating this stupid new facebook format. I quit! 2 minutes ago – Comment

[name deleted] is unable to figure out how to use new facebook. why is this a good idea? what was wrong with old facebook? 22 minutes ago – Comment

[name deleted] just wants the old one….facebook developers-you know we all do-give the people what they want or we’ll leave. 32 minutes ago – Comment

I agree with them. The new Facebook is annoying as hell to use. From my perspective this is an example of a company going way too much into feature rich, technical development and disregarding usability and user experience.

I know there’s always an adoption curve, but I’ve been getting bombarded with invitations to join groups like

“1 million strong against the new Facebook design” (funny enough this group already has ~2 million members)

I’ve seen other groups like this too just from doing a simple search query for groups on Facebook called “new Facebook”. If I had to estimate it off the top of my head, I’d say there’s probably about 5 million people who have JOINED groups against the new Facebook layout. Facebook has 100 million active users, which it prominently displays, advertises, and brags about. So 5% of people were annoyed enough with the new layout to join groups on Facebook. That means there’s probably a large number of people who despite their annoyance with the new Facebook layout either weren’t invited or were too lazy to join a group.