These are my notes from the The Search for a More Social Web talk by Dave Morin.

I had expected this talk to be about lessons learned by Facebook along the way as they've built the site. It actually was more of a product launch keynote and overview of recent launches.

There was a brief preamble about the history of communications from carrier pigeons and the postal service to telegrams and computers. Computers have become increasingly social from when they were first connected into a major computer network as ARPANET, followed by the creation of the World Wide Web, then email [ed note - I think he has his chronology wrong with this one] and chat. However social communications via computers hasn't really come into its own until recently.

Facebook has been working on the social graph for a few years. With Facebook, people for the first time are sharing their real identities and personal content on the Web in a big way. As time has gone by the nature of Facebook's social graph has changed. What was once a graph of relationships between college kids is now a graph that include  coworkers, friends, families and even celebrities.

There are three key pillars in the current Facebook experience

1. The stream (which used to be called the news feed): A chronologically sorted list of what people in your social network are saying, sharing and doing.
2. Social everywhere: With Facebook Connect they have now made it possible to bring social to every site on the Web.
3. The social graph: The graph of connections between users which has been expanded to enable users to connect to everything they care about. The recently announced changes to Facebook Pages now enables brands to participate as nodes in the graph and show up in the stream. Examples of such profiles around celebrities and brands on Facebook include CNN, Barack Obama and U2.

At this point, Dave Morin brought on Gary Vaynerchuck from Wine Library TV to talk about his experiences using the new, improved Facebook Pages to promote his brand and connect with his fans. The first comment Gary made was being glad that he no longer had to put under with the 5000 friend limit if he wanted to be able to participate fully in Facebook. He considers the changes to have turned Facebook into a word-of-mouth marketing machine on steroids. When he posts a video, it shows up in real time in the news feeds of his thousands of fans who can then redistribute it to their social networks if they like or dislike it with the click of a button [ed note – I really love that Facebook explicitly separate the notion of re-share and "like" instead of what FriendFeed does]. With Facebook he has the ability to note only broadcast to his customers but also listen to them by reading the hundreds of comments they leave in response to his videos. He considers this an important paradigm shift in how brands communicate with users and considers Facebook to be the most powerful social media marketing tool around today.

Dave then gave an overview of the four key aspects of the redesigned homepage shown below.

Filters enable you to control what content you see in your stream. The stream is a real-time stream of changes from your social network. The publisher allows you to share your thoughts or interesting content. The highlights section functions like the old news feed by showing you content from people you interact with the most or other notable content from your stream so you don't miss it.

The talk then switched focus to Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect enables all 175 million users of the site to take their Facebook experience to a host of partner sites. There are currently 6000 websites that have implemented Facebook Connect including TechCrunch, Vimeo, Meetup, Geni and Joost. All of these services have mentioned increased engagement from their user base from deploying Facebook Connect. TechCrunch has been getting higher quality comments from people who use the integration since it is attached to their real names. When you combine Joost with Boxee, it is now possible to see social to television by seeing what your friends are watching from your TV. There is also Aardvark social search engine which also will be integrating Facebook Connect [ed note – not clear this last one has actually shipped].

Facebook Connect has not only been used to bring social to the web but also to the desktop as well. Two key examples are Xobni integrating with Facebook Connect to bring social to your desktop email client and Apple iPhoto adding the ability to upload photos directly to Facebook. At this point Dave brought on Loic Le Meur of Seesmic who announced a new desktop client built on Adobe Air for interacting with Facebook now available at http://www.seesmic.com/facebook . You can find out more about this on Loic's blog post about the launch at Seesmic Launches the First Facebook Desktop Client Available Today. Screenshot of the application below. It only does status updates for now but is expected to show richer media types in forthcoming releases.

The question then is what are the next steps for Facebook with regards to their platform. In 2006, they shipped their first set of APIs. In 2007, they shipped the Facebook platform which now has over 50,000 applications. 2008 was the year of Facebook Connect. In 2009, they have done a couple of things thus far. They have opened up APIs to status, notes, links and videos. They are now active in community standards like OpenID and ActivityStreams where they are ably represented by Luke Shepard. They have also contributed to open source projects like memcached.

one more thing…

Dave announced Facebook Connect for the iPhone. He then brought on a number of CEOs of various iPhone application companies to talk about upcoming or just released applications for the iPhone that will integrate with Facebook. The CEO of Playfish which makes three of the top ten games on the Facebook platform and has over 60 million users was the first to speak. They are debuting Who has the biggest brain? for the iPhone. You can challenge your friends on Facebook and see where you rank with them directly from the iPhone. He was followed by the CEO of Social Gaming Network (SGN) which is debuting at least two games with Facebook integration. The first is Agency Wars where users can create a secret agent character then recruit or assassinate their Facebook friends. They are also the makers of iBowl which will be updated with the ability to see when your Facebook friends are online and challenge them to a game of bowling. One of the co-founders of Tapulous was next to talk about their next product Tap Tap Revenge 2 which is shipping with not only 250 new songs but also will use Facebook Connect so that you can challenge your Facebook friends to games in a new split-screen mode. Although they have their own social network it pales in comparison to the highly connected, 175 million user strong social graph on Facebook. Patrick O'Donell from Urbanspoon also spoke about their Facebook integration. Urbanspoon has 1 million restaurant reviews and 4 million iPhone users who have used the "shake" feature of the application over 200 million times. The key integration with Facebook is that restaurant reviews entered via your phone will now show up on your profile in Facebook and in your friends' stream. Joe Greenstein of Flixster was the final iPhone application developer to talk about their Facebook integration. They have 3.4 million users of their application on the iPhone and will now gives those users the ability to integrate their Facebook identity with the application. There are more iPhone applications expected to ship with Facebook integration in the coming weeks including applications from Zynga, Loopt, CitySearch, MTV, Citizen Sports and more.

More details on the Facebook Connect for iPhone announcement can be found on the Facebook official blog post entitled Facebook Connect for iPhone: Friends Now Included.

Now Playing: Dr. Dre - Let Me Ride (remix)

I'll be attending the SXSW interactive conference this weekend and wanted to share my schedule for any of my blog readers who want to meet up and chat after one of the sessions I'll either be attending or participating in.

SATURDAY

10:00 am ·  Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?  (danah boyd on privacy & social networks)

11:30 am ·  The Search for a More Social Web (Dave Morin from Facebook talking about the industry's search to make the Web more social. The kind of talk I'd have expected to be given by Kevin Marks)

2:00 pm ·  Opening Remarks: Tony Hsieh (the founder of Zappos.com talks about their legendary reputation as the kinds of customer service)

3:30 pm ·  Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet (your opportunity to heckle me on a panel – Facebook, FriendFeed, Yammer and Windows Live folks on the future of feeds in social networks)

5:00 pm · <nothing in this time slot interests me>

6:30 pm ·  Salon: Friendship is Dead (I always love discussions on whether social networks have devalued the notion of friends or made some of these ties stronger. wonder if they'll talk about Cameron Marlow's research on Maintained relationships in Facebook)

SUNDAY

10:00 am · <nothing in this time slot is in my areas of interest>

11:30 am ·  OpenID, OAuth, Data Portability and the Enterprise (Joseph Smarr and Kaliya Hamlin are well known for getting identity, authentication and authorization concerns on the Web so it will be interesting to hear their perspectives on what lessons can transfer to the enterprise, if any)

2:00 pm · <I'll spend this time getting my affairs in order since I go straight to the airport after my panel>

3:30 pm ·  Post Standards: Creating Open Source Specs (another opportunity to heckle me on a panel – two people from Microsoft on a panel on "open source" specs !?!)

I'll try to write up the sessions I attend while on the plane and will post them next week if I get around to it.

Now Playing: Geto Boys - My Mind's Playin Tricks On Me

In reading Facebook's recent announcements about upcoming changes to their homepage I've thought it weird that they are being so blatant about their fear of Twitter and altering the dynamic of their site so radically. Like John Battelle said, Facebook Shows "What's On Its Mind" – Twitter.

It seems pundits and social software nerds like myself aren't the only ones that think this. Below are a sampling of comments that confronted me on my Facebook homepage in the user replies to the Facebook post Welcome to your New Home Page.

As I've mentioned before, inline comments in feeds can detract a whole lot more than people think. This is one thing I love about Twitter's model. Just because I follow a popular user on Twitter doesn't mean I have to succumb to the flood of less than stellar replies from the rest of their followers.

Now Playing: DJ Green Lantern - We All Die Someday (Eminem/Lloyd Banks/Obie Trice/50 Cent)

After logging in, be sure to visit all the options under Configuration in the Admin Menu Bar above. There are 26 themes to choose from, and you can also create your own.

Below is a chart of home prices in my zipcode taken from Zillow 

We bought our house around the peak of that chart. According to Zillow our home seems to have lost about $50,000 in value since we bought it. That seems high on the surface but I know of at least one house in our neighborhood that just sold for $60,000 less than what the owners paid for it around the same time we bought our house.

I don't expect that the recently announced home owner rescue plan by the Obama administration (which is covered in a great Q & A in the New York Times blog) will have any effect on us given that we can afford our house and aren't in dire financial straits. Unless I end up one of the 3,600 waiting for the other shoe to drop and can't find a new job. At least I'm no longer an H-1B so I don't have to worry about needing to leave the country within a week or two if laid off.

I expect house prices to drop even further before we hit the bottom. This is a rational expectation when you look at the following chart

None of this would be a concern if we plan to live here for the next 20 – 30 years. However I have a horrible daily commute and as a new dad I'm not enamored with the schools in the area. 

So I punched some numbers into Pay Or Go: Walk away from your mortgage calculator and the result was a recommendation to walk away if we don't expect the house to appreciate back to the price we paid for it in the next 5 – 7 years. Given the historical chart above, I don't.

Articles like Silicon Valley 'underwater' homeowners: Should I stay or go? point out that the biggest consequence of walking away is having a blemish on your credit score for up to seven years. This implies to me that if moving to a neighborhood whose schools I feel better about is important then it makes sense to take the credit hit now, rent a place and put away the cost savings over the next seven years so we can have a great down payment when we want to move to that house in the great school district when Nathan will be about 7 years old.

On the one hand, I feel like I'm shirking some financial responsibilities even thinking about this but on the other hand I want to do what's best for my family. What do you guys think?

Now Playing: Bob Marley & The Wailers - Redemption Song

…just different requirements and constraints.

The top story on programming.reddit this morning is an example of how differently people can view the same incident and how it relates to making design decisions when trying to ship a software project.

Almost a decade ago, Joel Spolsky wrote an article entitled Two Stories which contrasted his time working at Microsoft with his time working at Juno (a popular ISP from back in the day). Below is the relevant excerpt from Joel's article which talks about his time developing the macro language that was to be used by Excel.

My first assignment at my first job was working at Microsoft, where I was told to come up with a new macro language strategy for Excel. Pretty soon, I had the first draft of the "Excel Basic" spec (which later evolved into Visual Basic for Applications, but that's another story). Somehow, this mysterious group of people at Microsoft called the "Application Architecture" group got wind of my spec, which must have concerned them, because for some reason they thought that they were in charge of things like macro language strategies, and they asked to see my spec.
…
So I proceeded to ignore them as diplomatically as possible.

This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him. Greg called a BIG MEETING and proceeded to complain about how the Excel team (meaning me) was screwing up the macro strategy. We pressured him to come up with some specific reasons but his arguments just weren't convincing. I thought it was nice that here I was, a new hire pipsqueak right out of college, arguing with employee number 6 and apparently winning the argument. (Can you imagine that happening at a Grey Flannel Suit company?) My programming team, headed by Ben Waldman (now a VP at Microsoft) backed me up completely, which was all that really mattered, because the programming team wrote the code and thus had the final say on how things got done.

Five years later, John Foust tracked down Greg Whitten to get his take on the same incident and then republished Greg's private response on the classic computing mailing list. The relevant excerpt from Greg Whitten's mail is below

On the Joel Spolsky subject he was a basically ignorant junior employee who left Microsoft after a short number of years. His short sighted decisions to take the VB macro language in Excel in its own directions caused 6 other major applications that were doing BASIC macro languages to diverge and not be able to share any macro programs between the applications. He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. The applications group spent 30 man-years integrating custom interfaces for each application with the Office 95 applications. In Office 98 they tossed it all and went back to my original suggestion which only took 1.5 man-years to develop and provided better commonality and learning between the applications.

It is instructive to compare both approaches to solving the same problem. Joel seems to be a believer in the philosophy that shipping is a feature which means you execute on your project by limiting dependencies while making sure you are building specific solutions to customers problems. Greg was big picture guy who wanted to ensure that all of the various BASIC macro languages being developed by different groups at Microsoft were compatible and could developers could easily port applications between them. They both have a point, on the one hand the designer of the Excel macro language shouldn't have to be limited by the constraints of building macros for Outlook but on the other hand anyone building common tooling or infrastructure for macros in Office would prefer that there weren't significant differences in the various macro languages in the product suite. So you end up with two smart people with contradictory goals and it is thus unsurprising that each thinks the other is ignorant.

The unfortunate thing about this entire incident is that it would have been a great learning experience for Joel if he had stayed on in Excel to see some of the consequences of his design decisions and then be in a position to consider whether he'd made the right tradeoffs in the first place. Of course, this is pretty commonplace when it comes to large software platforms where people can spend 3 – 5 years working on a single release which in combination with an average job tenure of 4 years in the U.S. (probably less in fast paced the software industry) means that many people never learn from their mistakes or improve their skills over time.

~~

As a program manager at Microsoft, I'm often in the same predicament as Joel was when he started working at Excel. Although the same challenge exists at every big software company, Microsoft is unique in its breadth of software offerings which means that almost every technology choice or design decision you make is an opportunity to pay some sort of strategy tax. The key thing I always keep in mind is that shipping is a feature and building software that delights our customers should have the highest priority. Being able to articulate how your choices reflect both of these points during every phase of the project is part of being a good program manager. Joel was able to do that, which is why he got to ship his project how he saw fit.

Now Playing: Korn - Freak On A Leash

Yesterday Mark Zuckerburg announced a number of interesting upcoming changes to Facebook in his post Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect which are excerpted below

What's New Today
Starting today, we are announcing new profiles for public figures and organizations. Once called Pages, these new profiles will now begin looking and functioning just like user profiles. Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. You'll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe.

We're also going to make some changes to the home page. The new home page will let you see everything that's shared by your friends and connections as it happens. It will also provide you more control by letting you choose exactly who you see among the people and things you are connected to. You can decide you no longer want to get updates from your old friend from high school who you rarely talk to, or you can filter the stream to only see updates about your family members. And now, if you want, you can read what President Obama is saying on the same page as your best friend. You can find out what it is your mother, your high school classmate or President Obama are doing, thinking and sharing right now just by logging into Facebook.

We'll begin rolling out the new home page next week, so please check out our home page tour to see the new design and let us know what you think about it. This is an exciting move for us and we have more coming, so keep an eye on the blog for more updates about upcoming products.

One thing you can say about Facebook, is that they are quick to adopt new features from hot startups once its been shown that those features have legs. Most recently, it has borrowed ideas such as the ability to post inline comments or indicate you like an item in our news feed from FriendFeed and with yesterday's announcement it looks like the company agrees that Assymetrical follow is a core Web 2.0 pattern as popularized by Twitter.

Facebook initially decided to segregate celebrities and brands from regular users with their Pages feature. Given the success that MySpace has had both from a user experience and monetization perspective from integrating brands into their social graph and treating them equally as users, I'm surprised that it took Facebook this long and that when they did it seemed this was more inspired by Twitter's success than MySpace's.

I expect this to significantly change the dynamic of Facebook especially since many people have already indicated they are fans of various brands on the site. So there are many people who will be exposed to this functionality right off the bat. What will happen when the site I used to visit to see what's going on with members of my extended family, former coworkers and high school friends becomes just as likely to be filled with marketing messages from Windows Mobile and 50 Cent because I've indicated interest in these brands?

Already, my news feed now has stuff like

which repeats a lot of the mistakes of the FriendFeed user interface such as too much space being dedicated to content I may be marginally interested in and putting people I have no interest in right in my face.

Twitter doesn't have these problems due to their core design being different. People only get 140 characters to make their point so I get more content on the page instead of half the screen being dedicated to a single update. Also I don't see @replies from people I'm not following so "me too" comments in response to content from popular users doesn't clutter my experience unless it comes from mutual friends and even then I can disable that feature.

As Facebook continues to grow, the legacy of their existing features will make it harder and harder for them to adapt to new trends. As someone who works on bringing new social features to decade old applications with pre-existing usage patterns and hundreds of millions of users as part of his day job, I know first hand how difficult things are going to get for them.

Now Playing: Bone Thugs 'N Harmony - Da Introduction

Yahoo! has thrown their hat in the ring and joined the hottest new trend on the Web, shipping your very own "Connect" technology. What is a "Connect" technology? David Recordon does a good job of summarizing the common characteristics of this new category of technology offerings in his post Anatomy of "Connect" where he wrote

a straw man definition of a "Connect" application:

1. Profile: Everything having to do with identity, account management and profile information ranging from sign in to sign out on the site I'm connecting with.
2. Relationships: Think social graph. Answers the question of who do I know on the site I've connected with and how I can invite others.
3. Content: Stuff. All of my posts, photos, bookmarks, video, links, etc that I've created on the site I've connected with.
4. Activity: Poked, bought, shared, posted, watched, loved, etc. All of the actions that things like the Activity Streams project are starting to take on.

In my mind, the Goals of all of these "Connect" applications are focused on helping people discover new content, people they already know as well as new people with similar interests.

Facebook launched this trend with their announcement of Facebook Connect which offered an alternative to OpenID by offering a smoother user experience and the opportunity for sites to also leverage their news feed as a viral distribution mechanism. According to the Yahoo! Developer blog there is now a similar offering from Yahoo! announced in their post Extend Your Publishing Reach with JS-Kit + Yahoo! Updates which states

Here's how it works: Integration with the Social Directory API allows JS-Kit to display a user’s Yahoo! nickname and avatar picture on the site. Integration with the Updates API allows JS-Kit to publish an item to the Yahoo! Updates feed when a user adds a comment to a web site powered by JS-Kit. At all times, your users remain in control of their data by leveraging OAuth to broker data access between Yahoo! and JS-Kit.

Yahoo! Updates allow publishers (and publishing partners like JS-Kit), to syndicate user-generated actions (ratings, reviews, comments, favorites, and uploads) to Yahoo!'s massive global distribution network. In the coming months, as Updates are implemented across Yahoo!, publishers will enjoy referral traffic back to their sites from across the Yahoo! Network (more than 500M+ monthly unique visitors).

The more of these "Connect" offerings that are announced the more they seem like introducing a new problem instead of creating a solution. Back in the day, it was easy to argue that having a button on your site is more palatable than the OpenID login box prompting users to enter some obscure URL. However when I go to places like Sun's website and see a comment box with the following

I wonder if this is progress. There are even more perverse cases like StackOverflow whose current login page looks like

Of course, this is just StackOverflow's attempt to make the OpenID sign-in process easier for users instead of having them remember some obscure URL. Still I wonder about the paradox of choice style experience that is being thrown in front of users. Whenever I go to Hacker News I actually forget which of my various Facebook/Windows Live/Google/Yahoo IDs I've previously associated with the site via ClickPass. It actually would have been easier and less confusing for me to just create a regular account on the site like did with Reddit which would also enable cookies to work so I wouldn't have to sign-in every single time.

I also wonder about the unnecessary duplicative efforts it will take sites to integrate all of these different "Connect" offerings as well especially when you consider how radically different APIs like Facebook's friends.get are from Yahoo's Contacts API. I'm typically against premature standardization but when you have almost half a dozen offerings that effectively do the same thing but with radically different APIs it may be time for standards to start showing up.

Now Playing: Domino - Sweet Potatoe Pie

Earlier this year I was approached about writing a book on cloud computing topics by an editor for one of the big computer book publishers. Given that between my day job and having an infant I barely have time to keep this blog updated, I had to turn down the offer. However I did spend some time taking a second look at various cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine then trying to put myself into the mindset of a potential customer as a way to figure out the target audience for the book. Below are the two categories of people I surmised would be interested in spending their hard earned cash on a book about cloud computing platforms

1. Enterprise developers looking to cut costs of running their own IT infrastructure by porting existing apps or writing new apps. 
2. Web developers looking to build new applications who are interested in leveraging a high performance infrastructure without having to build their own.

As I pondered this list it occurred to me that neither of these groups is well served by Google App Engine.

Given the current economy, an attractive thing to enterprises will be reducing the operating costs of their current internal applications as well as eliminating significant capital expenditure on new applications. The promise of cloud computing is that they can get both. The cloud computing vendor manages the cloud so you no longer need the ongoing expense of your own IT staff to maintain servers. You also don't need to make significant up-front payments to buy servers and software if you can pay as you go on someone else's cloud instead. Google App Engine fails the test as a way to port existing applications because it is a proprietary application platform that is incompatible with pre-existing application platforms. This same incompatibility rears its head when you look at App Engine simply as a way for enterprises to do new development. App Engine is based on Python, which if you look at the State of the Computer Book Market 2008, part 4 -- The Languages is not a terribly popular programming language. In today's world, enterprise development still means Java or .NET development which means enterprises will favor a platform where they can reuse their existing skills and technology expertise. Google App Engine isn't it.

So how about Web developers? In my classification, I broke up Web developers who'd be interested in cloud computing into hobbyists (like myself when writing a Twitter search engine on Windows Azure) and professionals (like myself when working on the platform that powers Hotmail's recently launched social features). Hobbyists either don't spend money or spend relatively little so I discounted them as a target audience of interest. The professional Web developers interested in cloud computing would be those who are considering Server or Web hosting but have concerns about scaling up if their service gets successful. After all, it seems like every week you are either reading about scaling hurdles that startup developers have faced as their applications become successful whether it is Bret Taylor's recent post How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data or Jeff Atwood's Deadlocked! which talks about how he had to learn more about SQL Server's locking strategy as StackOverflow.com became more popular. The fact that Google App Engine is limited to only Python meaning that it is unavailable to developers using WISC platforms and only a subset of developers using LAMP can participate on the platform. Furthermore, there are key limitations in the platform that make it infeasible to build a full scale application. For example, Bret Taylor mentions that a consequence of having a denormalized database they need to run a background "Cleaner" process which fixes up data references and makes their database consistence. The App Engine DataStore API requires applications to store data in a denormalized way but there is no facility to run background processes to clean up the data as FriendFeed and most other large scale services which use database sharding often do. According to a recent blog post the Google App Engine roadmap has been updated so at least this limitation will be addressed. Other limitations for Python developers are that they can't use all of their existing knowledge of Python libraries since it only supports a subset of Python libraries. Database developers may be relieved that a lot of database management tasks no longer exist but may be chagrined once they see the restrictions on queries they can perform and hear some of the horror stories about query performance. At the end of the day, it just didn't seem to me that there were many professional Web developers who would put up with all of this pain over just going with AWS or dedicated hosting.

That said, Google App Engine does address the long tail of developers which I guess is nothing to sneeze at. Maybe it will see some success from targeting the low end in the same way that AdSense targeted the long tail of advertisers and is now the powerhouse of search advertising. Maybe. I doubt it though.

Now Playing: Aerosmith - Livin' On the Edge

Earlier this morning I was reading a number of comments in response to a submission on reddit.com where I found out that despite being a regular visitor to the site there were multiple useful features I was completely unaware of. Here's a list of features I discovered the site has that I hadn't noticed even though I visit it multiple times a day

• Private user-to-user messaging feature including an inbox containing all responses to your comments.
• A social networking component which enables you to customize the site so you only see content from your friends.
• An option for bookmarking my favorite stories so I could come back to them later

These are all clearly useful features. In fact, some of them are features I'd have lobbied for if ever asked what features I'd like to see added to reddit even though they already existed. Considering that I'm a fairly savvy Web user and visit the site multiple times a day, it is problematic that I'm unaware of valuable features of the site which were the result of valuable effort from the developers at reddit.

This is a very commonplace occurrence in software development. As applications add features without wanting to clutter the interface, they begin to "hide" these features until it gets to the point where their users end up clamoring or pining for features that actually already exist in the application. A famous example of this comes from Jensen Harris' series of posts on the UI changes in Office 2007. There is rather informative post entitled New Rectangles to the Rescue? (Why the UI, Part 4) which contains the following excerpt

Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the naysayers, we weren't (and aren't) "out of ideas" for Office.  Customers weren't telling us that they didn't need new features--to the contrary, the list of requests is a mile long.  Every version we were putting our heart and soul into developing these new features, undergoing a rigorous process to determine which of the many areas we would invest in during a release, and then working hard to design, test, and ship those features.  The only problem was that people weren't finding the very features they asked us to add.

To address the issue above, the Office team effectively dedicated a release to making their existing features discoverable¹. This isn't the only example of a popular application dedicating a release to making features more discoverable instead of adding new features. The Facebook redesign of last year is another famous example of this which has lead to increased usage of the site.

A recent TechCrunch article, Facebook Photos Pulls Away From The Pack shows the effect of the redesign on the usage of the site

...
What accounts for Facebook’s advantage in the photo department? The biggest factor is simply that it is the default photo feature of the largest social network in the world. And of all the viral loops that Facebook benefits from, its Photos app might have the largest viral loop of all built into it. Whenever one of your friends tags a photo with your name, you get an email. This single feature turns a solitary chore—tagging and organizing photos—into a powerful form of communication that connects people through activities they’ve done in the past in an immediate, visual way. I would not be surprised if people click back through to Facebook from those photo notifications at a higher rate than from any other notification, including private messages.

But the tagging feature has been part of Facebook Photos for a long time. What happened in September to accelerate growth? That is when a Facebook redesign went into effect which added a Photos tab on everyone’s personal homepage.

The lesson here is that having a feature isn't enough, making sure your users can easily find and use the feature is just as important. In addition, sometimes the best thing to do for your product isn't to add new features but to make sure the existing features are giving users the best experience.

When you do find out that usage of a feature is low given it's usefulness and relevance to your user base, this is a good time to invest in an experimentation platform where you can perform A/B testing (aka split testing) and multivariate testing. There are a number of off-the-shelf tools for performing such experiments which enable you to test and validate potential redesigns today without unleashing potentially negatively impacting changes to your entire user base.

¹I believe the Office team shipped lots of new features as well in Office 2007, however the biggest change from an end user's perspective was the redesign not new features.

Now Playing: Metallica - Harvester of Sorrow