The Social

Facebook's Aditya Agarwal shows off its new Prototypes feature at TechCrunch50.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook took the stage on Tuesday afternoon at the TechCrunch50 conference for a "Developer Garage" event, to highlight just how important its team of engineers is to the company--and to unveil a new feature to let users play around with what they're up to.

Facebook engineering lead Aditya Agarwal unveiled a new offering called "Prototypes," which makes internal projects on the site accessible as applications on its developer platform. "Some of them are going to be buggy," Agarwal said. "Some of them are going to be super polished."

Prototypes, which is sort of like Facebook's version of Google Labs, had accidentally been unveiled in a company Twitter post earlier on Tuesday afternoon. "It's difficult to predict just what Facebook engineers will come up with next," Agarwal said of Prototypes, which has since been elucidated in a post on the company blog.

Many of Facebook's hottest new features were created in late-night employee "hackathons," Facebook Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer told the audience. Its new iPhone app was created by a single engineer (someone from Facebook told me that this employee was actually a summer intern, which makes it even more impressive), its "Facebook Lite" low-bandwidth-friendly site option was created by three engineers, and the brand new status tagging feature was built in a hackathon.

Some of the new prototypes, Agarwal explained, are photo tag searches, desktop notifications, and a way to filter news feed items to see which ones your friends have recently commented on.

Considering TechCrunch50 is an event devoted to new Web start-ups, Facebook also had a pitch for the entrepreneurs behind them: employee Justin Osofsky then came onstage to talk about Facebook Connect and why start-ups ought to implement . He cited the power of being able to share information on such a massive network, the advantages of not requiring a separate registration process, as well as the proven jumps in page views and traffic that some of the 15,000 sites currently using Facebook Connect have experienced.

At TechCrunch50, Facebook conveniently was able to make the dual announcement that it's cash flow positive and just hit 300 million active users. There are 6 billion minutes spent on the site every day, Schroepfer explained, 1 billion chat messages sent, and 80 billion photos stored on the site (20 billion individual photos, each stored in four different formats).

Within an hour of the site opening up the floodgates to vanity URLs this summer, 1 million had been reserved, Schroepfer explained. He reiterated that the company's engineers were what kept it all afloat.

"The problem with this is, we (were) basically asking 200 million people to show up at the Web site at about exactly the same time," Schroepfer said. "Most people would call this a denial of service attack. We called it a product launch."

Google is upgrading its search infrastructure and it's being really shady about it.

In a post on its Webmaster Central blog, however, Google engineers Sitaram Iyer and Matt Cutts insist that ordinary users won't even see the difference.

"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search," the post reads, making it all sound vaguely like some kind of elf workshop. "It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions." The user interface is unchanged.

Developers are encouraged to try out the new technology on a "sandbox" page and then offer feedback by including the word "caffeine" in Google's feedback text field, secret-password-style.

The company acknowledged that "some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet." But the industry buzz is obviously a huge part of it: There's a legitimate new contender in the search engine market, Microsoft's Bing, which is fueled by heavy marketing dollars and has begun to inch its way up in market share since its debut earlier this summer.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gives the impression that he isn't particularly worried about Bing. But it's hard to not look at a shadowy blog post about under-the-radar upgrades to Google's search index and not take it as a Googly way of saying, "game on."

These days, in this world of IKEA and Target and "Project Runway," we like to think we know about design. We also like to think that the biggest names in Silicon Valley know what they're doing design-wise.

Yet recently, we saw two of the Web's most prominent players hit by design-related snafus: first, the continuing brouhaha over Facebook's latest home page redesign, which many users claim makes the service more difficult to use; and second, the departure of Douglas Bowman, a high-ranking Google designer who accompanied his resignation with a blog post detailing his frustration over the company's data-above-all mantra.

They were different issues, for sure. The Facebook fiasco was one of user experience. The social network, its massive user base now bringing in plenty of people who certainly don't fit the profile of the young and tech-savvy early adopter, sprang a Twitter-like revamp that threw many users off guard. After complaints, a few tweaks were made, but some critics say it's still not enough.

"It makes you feel like there's a lot more to digest, and it's all happening right now," said Whitney Hess, a New York-based user experience consultant. "It's a bit of an information overload because it takes up almost all of the real estate of the entire home page."

Google's reason for making headlines in the design world of late, meanwhile, was all about something much more internal. Bowman implied that he was unable to synchronize his visual-design expertise with Google's mission to index all the information that it possibly can. That meticulous, almost card catalog-like attitude didn't carry over so well with him.

"Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better," Bowman, who had been hired at Google three years ago to start its visual-design team, wrote on his blog. "I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that."

Within hours of being published, thousands of people "liked" Product Director Christopher Cox's message to Facebook users, saying the company would be addressing the outcry over its latest redesign.

(Credit: Jennifer Guevin/CNET)

If Google's problem is excessive attention to data, Facebook's is an insistence on being at the forefront of communication. In other words, the difference between the two is that Google wouldn't change its products enough for the approval of a design professional like Bowman, but that Facebook (at least according to some users) was too willing to change in order to fit what it sees as the future of the industry.

In this case, it was the "information stream" made popular by Twitter--which, though it's a fraction of Facebook's size, has supplanted the social network as the hot name in connecting across the expanse of the Web.

With its new design, Facebook was effectively telling users that it intended them to start using the site for a different purpose, Hess said. "People are starting to get the sense that Facebook is changing what problems it's trying to solve," Hess said in an interview. "It started out being about connections, and it started to become about content, not just who you're friends with but what your friends are up to."

But at their core, both Facebook and Google were showing symptoms of the same problem: seduction by information, and the resulting disconnect between data and design. With its home page revamp, Facebook highlights the stream of content that its 175 million members are constantly pouring into its servers--links, images, videos, the random thoughts that make up "status messages"--and with its new "Share" interface, it encourages them to contribute even more.

That sort of extreme wealth of data must make anyone with access to the back-end operations at Facebook and Google--or, heck, even just your run-of-the-mill analytics junkie--simply giddy. But the face that a mainstream Web company puts forward is a visual one. And that can lead to quite the disconnect.

Hess pointed out the fact that when Google launched its Gmail e-mail client, there was no one-click "delete" button. "Google's response was, 'We gave you a gigabyte of space; you don't need one,'" she explained. "It was a technically focused response instead of realizing the real reason people want to delete their e-mail isn't because they want to make more digital space; they want to make space in their minds. They want to not have to look at something if they have an emotional response to it."

The backlash at Facebook's redesign is ironic, considering its clean, blue-and-white interface had typically gotten the thumbs-up from the design-conscious--especially as an alternative to its brasher, then-larger rival MySpace.

"There were other solutions out there, like Classmates.com, MySpace, and Friendster, that weren't doing the job," Hess said of Facebook. Finding a way for people to connect online "was a real problem, and they solved it."

Has Facebook strayed from its roots as the apex of user-friendliness? No, insists Christina Holsberry, the company's user experience manager. "Many of our designers are engineers and are the ones building some of the front-end functionality," Holsberry told CNET News. "The user experience team works very closely with them to come up with the right design. We spend time understanding user feedback and focusing on concerns, confusions, or user needs, and try to articulate the answers to, 'What are users saying and why?'"

Facebook has staved off previous user revolts by making small changes: the News Feed, for example, was scoffed at initially, its presentation criticized for being in-your-face promiscuous when it launched in the fall of 2006. A few extra privacy controls later, it's so central to the site that, ironically, when Facebook issued its latest redesign, users protested how much the News Feed had changed.

"We always run new designs by users to get their feedback, understand their concerns, and pinpoint any confusing areas," Holsberry said. "We typically bring people into our user-testing lab and observe how they use a new product, and then continuously iterate based on what we see from testing and any of our other feedback channels."

Facebook needs to be careful. Much of the Silicon Valley landgrab in the Web 2.0 boom was all about who reigned over mass content ownership: video hosting, photo sharing, blog posts, e-mail, and instant-message conversations. The sort of hunger for data and content aggregation that could make a visual design expert like Douglas Bowman feel cast aside at Google could also give off a heavy vibe that Facebook cares more about what it can pull in from users than what it can give back.

But on the flip side, an over-attention to trendy, consumer-grabbing design can be reason for caution too. That's what can make it downright impossible to assemble that new dining room table you just bought at IKEA.

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they'd like to hear answered.

Google Moderator, earlier named "Dory" after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google's "Tech Talks" series, then was extended to company all-hands meetings and other lectures at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

"There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn't clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked," Heath wrote in a blog post. "And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate."

After a few requests, Google has now released Moderator to the general public as part of its Google App Engine platform, and it's now available for free use. I'll start by asking a question about Moderator: What if audiences are too busy reading and voting on question submissions to actually listen?

(Credit: Segway)

Segway, the manufacturer of the scooter-like device that was supposed to change the world, is losing an early employee. Doug Field, the company's chief technology officer, is leaving the company to become a vice president of product design at Apple.

The announcement was made through a post on the Segway Chat forums by John Grohol, Segway's former "Web architect" who continues to help run Segway Chat.

"Doug has been the driving force in making the Segway what it is today and will be sorely missed at the company," Grohol wrote. "However, with every change comes good and bad. So while it's bad the rich history and experience of Doug is leaving, it's good in that perhaps the team will get a fresh perspective into possible engineering solutions for future versions of the Segway."

Official Segway representatives did not return a request for comment.

Meanwhile, after initial disappointment, the Segway keeps chugging--er, gliding--along. The company's latest big customer is the Chinese military, as security ramps up for the summer Olympics in Beijing. Inventor Dean Kamen, meanwhile, continues on his path to create life-changing devices.

This post was updated at 10:41 a.m. PT to correct John Grohol's relationship with Segway.

Just days after the news broke that Twitter lead architect Blaine Cook was leaving the company, it appears that the microblogging start-up has lost another techie: Silicon Alley Insider reported Thursday morning that Lee Mighdoll, vice president of engineering, will depart the company.

"After three months, both Lee and Twitter came to the conclusion that the match was not perfect," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in an e-mail to Alley Insider editor Peter Kafka. The company had hired Mighdoll in January. "We are seeking to fill this role with a refined search criteria that fits with our plan to scale Twitter as a company and as a service."

Looks like Twitter's notorious outages have claimed another high-profile employee.

A developer at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco downplayed the news, saying that Twitter was probably exercising a "try-before-you-buy developer policy." But it's no secret that Twitter needs to clean up its act--and maybe work on a business model, too.