Facebook Updates Events, Makes “Not Attending” Less Insulting
Facebook has modified its Event pages to hide people who decline invitations.
You can still find out who couldn’t just be cordial and leave the invitation pending by drilling into the renamed “Going”, “Maybe” and “Invited” categories. Facebook’s goal is likely to get more people accurately responding to invitations by making them feel less rude for declining.
Facebook also rolled out a few other refinements to Event pages. If you do decline an invitation, you’ll be prompted to post why on the Event’s wall. This encourages the token invites people send to friends on the other side of the world. These token invites are viewed as needless distractions by some, though others think they are cute ways to remind people you’re thinking of them.
If someone won’t stop spamming you with invites, you can now block them from sending you them straight from the decline step rather than having to visit your privacy settings. Bad news for spammy promoters, good news for everybody else.
If you tag a Place as the location of an Event, Facebook will display a Bing map with a quick link to directions. By rewarding organizers with a map for tagging Events to Places, Facebook can build its location database with where people gather. It will also provide exposure to its maps partner Bing, which Facebook presumably wants to help steal market share from Google Maps.
Unfortunately, Facebook managed to mess up the most basic piece of Event functionality through the update. It’s now hard to tell whether you’re already set as attending or need to respond to an invite because the unclicked “Join” button (needlessly changed from “Attend”) is highlighted blue next to the gray Maybe and Decline buttons. Why has this been made the standard?
Facebook may be trying to make it easy to find the most commonly pressed button on the page, but if all three buttons are unclicked, they should all be the same color.
Facebook Events are basic, and that works well. They became popular through simplicity, and the product was on its way to becoming a backbone of planning offline gatherings. The intentions behind the changes seem sound, but Facebook needs to make it obvious whether I’ve already said I’m attending your party.
With many screaming at the fact that things are just becoming too messy, there is an increasing pressure to make Facebook Events relevant again so that the “Yes, No, Maybe” can once again be respected and used with a sense of honesty and truthfulness to it rather than clicked on with a “meh” feeling.
Facebook Events have lost a battle they once dominated in.
Facebook must re-examine this in order to retain a percentage of the userbase which relies on the Events feature for their event planning and organisation.
