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.

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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?

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…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.

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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.

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