A survey that went out Tuesday morning by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) had a lot of people talking about what the findings meant. The ACSI survey is nothing new, however this is the first year they included some of the social networking sites. And the results conclude that, drum roll please: Facebook sucks.
But what does it all mean, Basil? (Austin Powers voice) I’m not convinced it means anything. Facebook is about to hang the sign of over 500 million served, remember? Let’s put it in the context of the Internet Social Media sites that were surveyed this year: Wikipedia – 77, YouTube – 73, All Others – 72, Facebook – 64, MySpace – 63 (all respectively out of 100). The median score for Internet Social Media was 70. Now let’s analyze this high-level data. YouTube only scored 9 points better – you know YouTube, the video portal to the internet? They stream over 2 billion videos per day. So the video portal to the internet scored a low C, and the social networking portal to the internet scored a low D. Does that mean that we are destined to be a human race no smarter than the caveman? Or does it mean that the true validity of this survey has to remain in context when analyzed. The latter seems to be the case.
- privacy and security concerns
- the technology that controls the news feeds
- advertising
- the constant and unpredictable changes
- spam
- navigation troubles
- annoying applications with constant notifications
- functionality
The ACSI numbers, as its latest press release (PDF) explains, come from “interviews with approximately 70,000 customers annually.”
Did they manage to find the 70,000 people in the world that weren’t on Facebook?
Because it seems highly unlikely that you would give a 63/100 score to a website that you don’t let lie dormant for more than a couple hours. Facebook is the drug of choice for some 500 million people as their “social home” on the internet. So my advice to you, take this report with a grain of salt.
There are plenty of things I can check mark the box LAME about Facebook:
- Farmville, Mafia Wars and the like taking up my news feed.
- The blocked application list I have: 537 strong.
- Security settings changing without user notice.
- Security settings changing every 34.5 seconds.
- Security settings being non-existent.
- Security settings, well hell, security on Facebook.
[from the back of the lecture hall] So what grade did you give them Ryan, a 37?
I give Facebook a 4,189/100. They’ve done to social networking what Google did to search. Do I hate the control Facebook has? Absolutely. Do I continue to give it more and more control? Absolutely.
I have candles that burn at both ends, care for a box?