For a long, long time, there was a really bad word on Facebook. It was often visible on the site where everyone could see it. And you were supposed to click it. But you never did—no one did, really. We just ignored it. It made us feel bad and weird. That word was "decline."
Ever since Facebook Events was introduced back in 2005 (when it was called "My Parties," LOL) until very recently, if you wanted to let someone know you couldn't go to their kegger, baby shower, or cat's birthday party, you almost assuredly just hit maybe, or ignored it entirely.
"It's hella harsh," says Kathy Matosich, a content strategist for Facebook Events. Hella harsh, indeed: Hitting this button meant whoever invited you would see your name and photo listed under the event's "declined" section, which basically meant you hated them. What if you'd wanted to go but simply couldn't? What if you just weren't sure? An easy way to side-step the utter negativity of "Decline" is to hit "Maybe," which, as any party planner knows, flies directly in the face party planning.
"People hated clicking that," says Matosich. "That's the language of the button, that's what goes out to the host. It spiders out: 'So and so declined my event, did I do something wrong?'" When it came time for Facebook to revamp its events pages, the team considered a variety of possibilities to replace decline: No, Can't Go, Not Going, No Thanks, and Unable to Go were among the options.
Eventually, Can't Go was the chosen winner, because while Not Going is more literally accurate, the intent of Can't Go is truer to what people want to communicate. "People don't know how much care we put into this. It's one little button, it's one little option, but we want to think through all the use cases," Matosich explains, saying the team testing the phrases across different UIs and scenarios (how it looked in different notification screens, and as a response to birthday parties, memorial services, book clubs). "We don't believe in edge cases, we want to find something that works for everyone. We don't want to alienate anyone or make anyone feel icky ... we don't want to put words in anyone's mouth."
When Facebook replaced "Decline" with "Can't Go," a funny thing happened: People actually started using it.
Events has long been in what Facebook calls "maintenance mode." Basically, the very popular feature has had only a small dedicated team of engineers keeping the lights on, making sure you could smack a photo on the cover and tell people about your event. The progression toward something more usable started about a year ago.
Facebook data scientist Ben Bregman tells me that by analyzing how people were using the events pages, and with some design tweaks, the team was able to double the average number of people who view any public event. Also helping assist this has been the introduction of "Interested," which is a nice soft yes to a public event that will keep you in the loop of what's going on with it without asking you to really commit. It's the internet version of hanging onto that pamphlet about the community barbecue because, I mean, maybe you'll go but also, what if something better is happening?
If you feel like you've seen more public events in your News Feed recently—and maybe in your Notifications too—you're not wrong. Facebook has retooled how it treats these community occasions, fussing with its algorithms to decide what events to show you, as well as when and why.
"We wanted to make sure we used [News Feed] and Notifications effectively to engage users," says Aditya Koolwal, a product manager at Facebook. Koolwal, who works on public events says that in the last year, the team has been trying to find the right signals to tell you about events you might be interested in, and when to send information on them to your News Feed or—in what he calls "very high signal" situations—your Notifications.
In News Feed, one way you'll start seeing more events is similar to how Facebook's Related Articles works: If you click on one story, a card with "related links" to similar stories will show up. So now, if you click on a local wine tasting event, a card with similar happenings will show up. The action might get you in the habit of wanting to use Facebook to discover events. That isn't something that we've typically turned to Facebook for, but the network is plenty happy to start providing the service. Of course, in addition to getting related events in front of us, the News Feed now favors public events, giving them more weight than it previously did, considering things like your location, friends, and interests to decide which events to surface. Basically, it's capitalizing on FOMO, and unabashedly so.
All of this might bother you. Facebook's determination for what goes into your News Feed is a source of much contention and handwringing. "How dare it decide what I see and when," is a common theme when talking about Facebook's algorithm. It's a statement worthy of merit when talking about publishers, and how often their content is displayed in Facebook users' feeds. But really, to hear that Facebook is giving a little juice to local, public events in your feed shouldn't be terribly disruptive to the average user. But notifications? That's a whole other thing.
"If there's a very popular event going on near you, we'll send you a notification," says Koolwal. And then, again, that whole FOMO thing kicks in: Four of your friends are going to an event near you? They've all already checked in? How did you not already know about this?! All of that pushes you to want to be included, to start looking at local events more. Maybe even actively trying to discover them.
Koolwal says over the next few months, Facebook will be focusing on giving people access to a way to browse events—which means some users will be lucky test subjects for a Facebook Events Discovery feature. Local event discovery is a bit of a pain point: I moved to the Bay Area relatively recently, and trying to start a social life from scratch is actually rather unpleasant for an adult who knows almost no one in a new city. "Things to do this weekend in Oakland" Google Searches and scouring through Eventbrite and Yelp yield so-so results. Even if I found something, I'd still have to find someone who might want to go with me. The benefit of Facebook, obviously, is that everyone's already there—you can immediately see who among your friends is going, send them a private message link to an event, or, if you're feeling particularly bold, just invite them.
"We have a good sense of how people look for things to do," says Koolwal. "The social signals we have, the friends who are interested in going, the friends you can potentially go with—that's our bread and butter, so we're going to try and take advantage of that as much as we possibly can as we roll out more discovery features."
There's a dedicated Facebook page you can use to create an event. You might not have known such a thing exists, but it does: events.fb.com. The team pushed this tool live (without promoting it) when the revamp began. Using beautiful, screen-consuming photos, Facebook guides you through the creation of an event, even encouraging you to embed videos. Once you choose to make your party private or public, you're pushed back into Facebook. The tool is just for setting up an event, and you have to use Facebook for managing and updating the event. The fancy, beautiful tool is a way for Facebook to draw in people who might not have otherwise used the network for party-planning purposes. Or another way to put it is that it's a way for Facebook to keep somebody from using Eventbrite, Yelp, Evite (please no), or Paperless Post.
Facebook wants to do this thing right, because if it does, it could end up owning the online event discovery and invitation space. And really, Facebook very nearly does already own that space, and it managed to get there without really trying that hard.
While Facebook may be looking far forward, the Events team remains devoted to the feature's original purpose: inviting people to birthday parties. Well, not just birthday parties, but you get the idea—events that you organize privately, small gatherings for you and your friends. In addition to introducing "Can't Go," the group dedicated to private Facebook events wanted to find more ways to drive RSVPs.
"When people ignored an invitation," says Lily Jolly, a product manager at Facebook who focuses on private events, "it felt like we were in the same room and I was like, 'Do you want to come to my dinner party?' and you were just like..." at which point she begins glancing around the room to avoid eye contact with me to demonstrate her point. She says Facebook changed its notifications system to tell you if important friends were going. The new language is more human too: "Alex and Brittany are going to *The Best Birthday Party EVER WOOOOHOOOO!!!!!!!!!!* on Sunday, let them know if you are!"
About those event titles: Facebook hates them. Well, not hate hates them, but they do make creating push notifications a challenge. Android and iOS only allow so many characters to take up space on your screen. "They are either really long, or really short," says Matosich. Just keep that in mind that next time you want to include your cat's full name surrounded by tildes in an event title. In a development session I sat in on, there was much counting on fingers for character length when talking about push notifications regarding events, as well as discussion over whether you could verb something and it sounded normal. "How do we feel about colons?" somebody asked; turns out they might lend a robotic tone to notifications.
Beyond language, Facebook also added more creative tools. You can now choose from themed illustrations if you don't have the perfect cover photo for something. (This works from a mobile device, too). And a biggie: You can invite people who aren't on Facebook, which is great. "Everyone's on Facebook" is generally a true statement, but if they aren't, they can still learn about your party.
What about after the event, when all that's left is a stack of Solo cups, the skin from the brie, and a handful of blurry memories? "In user research, people would light up when we asked about their last party," Jolly says. "So we wanted to help bring those good feelings back more often." She says in the coming weeks, we should see some new features that help us remember the good times. I didn't get any specifics beyond that, but it's not too hard to imagine that something like Facebook's "On This Day" feature could be applied specifically to parties. You could even see photos pop into your notifications a day or a week after a gathering.
"Once that kind of thing is happening, it's easier to connect people," Bregman says—though, to some extent, people are already connecting. He says Facebook's data shows that after private events, an average of one new friendship will develop in the week after.
"People who were not friends before, they attend an event, and they start a relationship on Facebook; that's something we're tracking pretty closely and we think there's tons and tons of room to continue driving that."
This is where I take a huge leap: What if Facebook decided to try to drive new friendships with public events? What if, say, Facebook can see me check into the trivia night at the bar down the street every Monday night? And it sees this other guy check in every Monday night too? And it knows, hey, we live in the same neighborhood, and we like some of the same movies? Would Facebook say, hey, you two have been going to trivia here every week, maybe you should be friends?
"If you're thinking about it, it's not crazy," Bregman conceded, albeit laughing at me a little. "If it's a thing that happens in the real world, then we want it to happen on Facebook."
