I heart Face­book. This morn­ing I awoke to Yet Another Face­book Inno­va­tion (YAFI). Face­book amazes me because they are dri­ven to make things eas­ier for me — or at least give it a go. Face­book is will­ing to suf­fer con­stant back­lash in order to improve usabil­ity and efficiency.

Case in point below:

In this par­tic­u­lar case, the inno­va­tion is what I call a “Twit­ter­ish” inno­va­tion — steal­ing some­thing directly from Twit­ter. A cou­ple weeks ago, I stayed up until 12:01AM to secure another hype-drenched Twit­ter­ish inno­va­tion: van­ity URLS: facebook.com/chrisabraham — I am such a sucker!

How­ever, Face­book is an equal-opportunity thief and also quite cre­ative as well. Next inno­va­tion inspired by Utterli, Friend­Feed, or LinkedIn?  Who knows!

I hate to admit it but I am used to lazy web appli­ca­tions.  I am used to apps like Flickr, Deli­cious, Craigslist, Ebay, MySpace, Twit­ter, and YouTube — sites that are pretty much the same as they were when they were born. Face­book, on the other hand, inno­vates almost con­stantly. In fact, Face­book tends to inno­vate so aggres­sively that there are mil­lions of mem­bers who con­stantly picket Face­book to revert itself to the way it was when it was a college-only ser­vice. The rea­son why most apps don’t inno­vate is because of this vocal minor­ity — the change-averse.

Another thing I love about Face­book is that they’re not wed to their inno­va­tions.  When Face­book Bea­con pissed off the world, they scaled it back. The devel­op­ers at Face­book are smart — land grab with ten new inno­va­tions, throw them agains the Wall, and then see what peo­ple adopt and then, over time, remove the fails.

Face­book is will­ing to spit­ball, Face­book is will­ing to steal ideas shame­lessly from other plat­forms, and Face­book is will­ing to fail fast and move on.  That’s what you’re sup­posed to do!  That’s why I love Face­book.Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.

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