Peter is on Facebook. And does not like it. (understatement)
One needs to have an account on Facebook if you want to look at any postings any user makes. No wonder Facebook has billions and billions and billions of so-called users. (Statistics, ah!). So after I joined two years ago, and kept my foot tracks well covered, I am coming out (so to speak): My Facebook profile is now public.
Well, I already had 4 "friends" before I made my profile public. And I had not even used my real name.
But now you can be-friend me as if there were no tomorrow. Write on my wall like it was yours. Spam me with your applications and videos. Do it! Do it! ;-)))
So, just as I use Twitter, I want to play with what it can do and what it can't, as a social site, creating a community. Even if it was just to experiment.
And I don't like it. The user interface sucks. They made it an art turning something simple into something utterly complex. Is there a science in making software cumbersome for mere mortals? Is this what Computer Science PhDs make these days?
Apparently they just had a facelift (I never used the old 'Facebook' so can't compare), and no wonder 94% of the Facebook users don't like it.
I get utterly confused as what Facebook aims to be. A Twitter with pictures, and links? With some applications you can link into, as a sort of 'my webpage'. An iGoogle for non-techies? But why then, why do they have to make it so complicated?
I know posts of my blog are automatically imported to my Facebook, but - heaven is my witness - I can't find back where they put it.
I know I can put links in something they very significantly call 'my wall' (like I write on my wall at home, rrright), but why, then, why don't they let me edit the text that comes with the link?
I know Lydia wrote on my wall-to-wall (I got an email saying she did so), but I swear, I can't find it. And what a weird name "wall-to-wall". No wonder I feel claustrophobic each time I go onto Facebook.
I once got on a wall-to-wall with Sophie in China and wrote something on it, but no way to trace it back.
Every time I click on this or that, it asks for authorization to access my profile this and my approval for thing that and disclaimer of the other. Phew. It looks like I am signing my life away each time I click on something.
If people had to pay for Facebook, they would be left with a dozen users, I guess.
It smells like Microsoft a couple of years ago: people used it because it was the least painful of all evils. And just like Microsoft looses market bit by bit (look at the bad press Explorer is getting versus Chrome and Firefox), Facebook has only one way to do: Down baby...
Facebook? Beeeeh.
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
4 comments:
I got so sick with facebook and (as you say) spam with application and other requests. Now I use it (and on a sporadic manner) to send messages to my friends (most of them are at WFP) to find out how they are. Just a quicky, because for this it is convenient.
Other than that: Bof.
I have around 40 friends on facebook. Whereby I think the term friends has been watered with facebook. Because, how can you have (as some do) 875 friends?
But the nice thing with facebook is that you are not obliged to use it, there are other social networks.
Just as you talk about browsers. I don't remember when I "touched" Internet Explorer last. But since years, I am faithful to Firefox.
And my Windows days are gone since long too, thanks to Linux.
Do you know that your RSS feed actually has footer that includes a link to "Share on Facebook"? Courtesy of Feedburner, I suspect.
FB was not that bad until recently, and its basic functionality was okay, as long as you didn't want to 'enrich' your page with all kinds of cutesie applications -- but the recent 'upgrade' has been a disaster. The new UI is one of the most user-unfriendly I have ever used and has caused me to make several mistakes already (general postings instead of private messages, that sort of embarrassing blunders). I wonder whether they will get the message and move back to the old one.
I don't have a Facebook account. My son has forbidden it. This was when it first opened to the public. He said it would be "creepy" to have your mom on Facebook, even though we're flickr mates. So I decided to do a blog instead. Both my kids have made comments about some of the new weirdness going on with Facebook, too.
haha this is so strange to me, having 'grown up' with facebook in college, and being relatively new to twitter.
i would say that fb is more about keeping in touch with people socially (what they're stressed about, share funny videos, pictures, etc.) rather than intellectually (what they're reading, thinking, moved by)
unlike twitter, it makes a big difference if your (real-life) friends are facebook.
i guess it's kind of hard to explain - but maybe there's a generational gap here :O
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