Back to Facebook 1.0
How I built Quokka — a Facebook for friends
Today’s news about the massive abuse of Facebook’s user data through Cambridge Analytica to boost the campaign of then-candidate President Trump wasn’t the beginning of my thoughts on how to build a network as Facebook’s initial version once has been nor was it the discussion on fake news which gave me the idea to design a fake-news filter which led to the admission at Code University.
What I was missing in Facebook was the feeling to read and interact with my friends. In my feed I see more posts from news agencies, groups and others rather than my friends. Also is it worrying that the many news, the whole politics and so on have turned Facebook into a political battlefield which led us to difficult, sometimes hardball discussions.
What I wanted to achieve was to create a new network for my friends. No pages, no groups, no ads, but also something where I can work with ideas for a better UI and UX.
Role-Model Facebook 1.0 “The Initial Version”
So I already got an idea about the What. What are the features I want? What do I want to keep out? What would I change? And most important: what is important?
I want users to become friends, I want them to have a profile and to post with images. Really basic, similar to Facebook 1.0. What I wanted to keep out are ads, groups…
With my current profile I once joined a group where Dems and Reps can discuss about politics. I have never seen so much hatred, missing respect for other opinions. With another profile I wanted to check out if other groups are similar. Then I a group full with Trump-supporting Reps I saw how hateful people are, with my current profile I joined Dem-groups and saw disrespect.
… and pages, APIs and so on. Let my friends matter again. Facebook of course uses — or at least used — the Edge-rank algorithm. However, I still don’t see many posts from my friends.
Wind of Change
Surely times changed. Messengers are getting more important and I assume that from my 315 friends not everybody is online and if sharing the same feelings about Facebook not everybody is about to post.
But we should reconsider on how the world can become a better place for all of us. The greater idea behind Quokka…
…was and still is a decentralized network where users plug-in and plug-out their accounts and control their data the way content-providers can do. But with the right interfaces there can be many different networks with different UIs working with the same dataset, enabling a network which is really open. The same way we then could offer content by making it generally available. But this is far more in the future and not what I want to achieve with Quokka.
Quokka doesn’t disagree with Facebook, but…
Facebook is a fantastic tool and I like it despite of its problems. But I disagree with Facebook’s current path.
Unlike many others — especially in Germany — I understand Facebook needs to earn money to maintain data-centers and the whole web-app. But how important can an angry user be? As a user who is reading headline XYZ oder ZYX I can easily get angry, maybe not because of the headline itself, but because of the comments — though people are making money with publishing fake-news. Unhappy people aren’t as valuable as happy people I assume. And here Facebook should act. On the one side it must guide us to leave our bubble, but on the other hand we have to be more respectful again and see the human behind an opinion again. Then Facebook would be more relevant to advertisers again.
The Interface, the Experience and the User
My first issue was to create a better newsfeed — or friendfeed. Not only Facebook has the problem that the newsfeed is just one element between two columns to navigate on Facebook or LinkedIn or VK.
My Quokka feed — as applied on my recruiting-platform project Skilling — is a single column with texts embedded into the body. I prefer to call it a face as the human face as soft transitions from skin to eyes, nose, mouth and more. It is something I wanted to achieve. An organic interface which lets you focus on the content friends posted and which can unfold the whole dimension of feelings the post has.
The design is clean and minimalistic. One role-model was the introduced and then abandoned redesign-concept Facebook once started (though — as usual — the images from Facebook looked better then the working design seen on my mother’s screen). Also do I love the design Medium has. It’s also focussed on the content, clean and fast. There are no notifications at the top. Instead will you see notifications as a part of the feed between the posts so that you won’t be distracted by a blinking icon at the upper right.
And so did I work on a simpler, friendlier interface for the profile.
Like the feed my profile design is organically embedded into the body. There won’t be many possible interactions as I want to avoid a bunch of features few people know they exist.
Like all networks I want some details, but this is not for crunching data but to initialize discussions between the users about books, music, their interests and more.
Quokka can be a bit more like a blogging-platform such as Medium because you can open and read longer posts as you see on the screenshot above. On the screen there’s no comment function. This will come very soon.
Same Stack as Facebook, Realized in less than a Week
According to some posts on Quora[1][2] Mark Zuckerberg worked around two weeks or more on Facebook’s initial version. I got it within a week using the same stack as he did — PHP and MySQL. Also do I use jQuery and Ajax. For the front-end I use Bootstrap 4. To code I have been using Sublime.
Closing Words
Quokka is about to start for my friends and some told me that they would like to join. This could be the right time to start and try a new network.
My intention is not to be commercial. Maybe it is time to try something else, something with no ads.
About me
My name is Christian and I am a product manager who currently resides in Germany. I hold a degree in social sciences from Bielefeld University and while studying I began to work on products with some talented developers. I have a specific interest in networks, HR and recruiting tools.
In 2017 I got the admissions for Draper University in San Matteo, CA and a scholarship, but had to withdraw due to financial issues. Also did I get the admission to Code University in Berlin, Germany for the design of a fake-news filter applicable on social networks. Same problem here that led me to withdraw my application.
I have been working with PHP and MySQL for more than a decade, but I witnessed a huge jump in the last nine months.
If you enjoyed my article I would appreciate if you would click on the “clap” below. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to comment on my post. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
