Facebook: Close to MySpace?

Mashable recently ran an excellent piece about the new Facebook timeline. From the piece:

The potential danger is that there will be too much information to make the site useful. It sets up an increasing flood of content, making it more difficult than ever to find what is relevant. The shift forces more people to ask, “How much of my own time do I want to spend reading about the activities of someone else’s life?”

Reports show that more and more people are feeling overwhelmed by technology, and a recent National Sleep Foundation study found that a whopping 63% of Americans say their sleep needs are not being met during the week. We may be increasingly connected, but that does not mean that our quality of life necessarily improves.

It’s not likely we will see a mass exodus from Facebook in the coming months, but people will need to spend more time and effort weeding through irrelevant information. The service may increasingly tax our attention and patience.

Click here for the whole article.

As has been discussed all over the blogosphere, Timeline is a massive change to the user interface. Facebook needs to tread carefully here. In the book, I make this very point. By letting people customize their timelines, Facebook runs the risk of becoming too difficult to interpret, à la MySpace. Facebook’s standardization has been a key source of it’s growth. People get tired of having to find out how to add photos, find out what's being shared—and with whom, etc.