ncredibly dysfunctional" is not an option you can list as your relationship status onFacebook, but that seems to be the way to describe the site's relationship with its users. It's like an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend you hate so much but just keep going back to again and again and again, possibly because you can't find anyone better.
Never has the site been more popular. It just reached half a billion users -- just six months after reaching the 400 million mark. Facebook was quick to trumpet those numbers, and with them came the announcement of Facebook Stories. Supposed to be a place where you can tell the world about how Facebook changed your life, or something. Most of them go like this: Someone you don't know met up with someone else you don't know and got married and made babies. I guess you could also go there and write something about how a mishandled privacy setting ruined your life, or at least embarrassed the hell out of you. A story's a story -- it's not called "Nice Facebook Stories."
Anyway, at the same time everyone was huffing big bags of Facebook love, the American Customer Satisfaction Index piped in with a huge buzzkill: The site scored just 64 out of 100 on its latest E-Business report. That puts it in the bottom 5 percent of companies -- that's below the usual dumped-upons like airlines, cable companies, and even the IRS.
The results are kind of curious -- ACSI's methodology talks a lot about "customers," but reading the report, it makes is sound like the people they're actually polling are users. Is it fair to call them "customers?" I've never bought anything from Facebook -- have you? Probably not, unless you're an advertiser -- those are what I'd call Facebook's actual customers. And considering the kind of stuff that Facebook users say they're displeased with, it sounds like advertisers may well be very satisfied with Facebook's performance.
According to Larry Freed of ForeSee Results, which produced the survey with ACSI, it all boils down to three main complaints. First is the constant site redesigns, and it's pretty rare to hear anyone -- user or advertiser -- rave about yet another interface makeover.
The second main complaint is the commercialized nature of the site. It's amped up the ads and marketing big-time over the last few years, and users are getting sick of it. But if the site 's growing so quickly -- those last 100 million members were added in the last half-year, remember -- then maybe those new members won't mind the ads so much. They never saw it before the commercialization started really picking up. For them, what's going on now is normal. If I'm buying ads, everything sounds fine to me.
Another user grumble is privacy -- they say the controls are confusing, and it's troubling how much access application makers have to their private profile info. That's a completely legitimate complaint from a user satisfaction standpoint, but if we're talking about Facebook's actual customers, this is like the cows complaining that Tillamook makes too much cheese. For the ad guys giving Facebook money, your private info is delicious. They can't get enough. They wouldn't want to see all the cows wander over to another pasture, of course, but those growth numbers indicate that won't happen any time soon.
