Winds of Change - Facebook or is that Farcebook?
First off, I realise the... irony of posting a complaint about another social site on live journal, I also realise that Facebook is a system I’m not paying for and so I don’t have the right to complain really, HOWEVER, I’m still going to complain a little.
Also, I have seen way more eloquent posts from various friends about the changes on face book. But I still want to have a whinge.
Over the years Facebook has had various changes that people have complained about when they have been implemented and then slowly got used to them. In hindsight the changes Facebook have previously made have actually been reasonably okay, to the point that I can barely remember what those changes actually were. The largest change was their chat system and putting the list of friends down the right hand site. Again, a quite innocuous change that is easily ignored. Even the news feed changes they made were reasonably optional. I was able to revert the feed to how I like it, seeing my friend’s status updates in order and being able to quickly scroll through and get an update of what has happened in the last time I haven’t been online.
There are two major changes to face book that I have seen that annoy me. One reduces the usability for me from “really useful to keep in touch with all my friends” to “I have a quick scroll through get the random updates and hope I haven’t missed anything important” The other changes is less of a useability issue for me and more of a “WTF did they do that? I can see your underwear!” Kind of an issue.
Issue one: The news feed is no longer chronological from top of page to bottom as you scroll. Previously the post at the top would be the latest update that had hit the system from a few minutes ago or seconds. NOW looking at my webpage, several top stories from 8 hours ago, and then a couple from 20 minutes ago and then it bounces back 2 hours 4 hours etc... From NOW to 8 hours ago there are 3 posts. My friends list is usually way more active than that even at stupid A’M’s in the morning. I can only assume that the special algorithm Facebook is using to work out what posts should be important to me actually degrade most of the posts my friends are making so they are flagged as “really unimportant” (The algorithm appears to operate on comment length. SO If people post LONG comments to a update that update will get a higher priority in the “top story” window... and the more comments and the longer their comments are, the longer that story is in the top post category or so it seems) (and I have just refreshed my page and got a whole lot of comments from the last hour just come through, even though I have regularly been refreshing this page as I write this post)
This annoys me… A LOT. I will decide what’s important to me. If a friend is posting rude posts about their genatalia, I want to be able to DECIDE that I block that post. I don’t want the post to be buried automatically.
This means that I am now missing most of my friend’s updates. The feed is, as of now, unreliable and suspect. This is my MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR complaint about the new Facebook
Issue two: This is less of an ISSUE for me and more of a concern. On the right hand side of the face book window there is a scrolling feed which is similar to a twitter feed. This feed shows everything real-time of what your friends are writing on other peoples walls. If James posts on Andrews’s wall that he had a great time at the strippers last night, I will see a message in my feed telling me that James made that comment.
WHY Facebook? Why is this relevant to me and how is this not an itsy privacy issue, albeit it a smoke and mirrors privacy by obscurity issue?
I have seen a number of methods of dealing with this, none of them ideal and none of them I will implement.
The First Solution: There is an option to individually select people and select an option for each of them that says effectively “don’t show this users posts in your instant feed”. People are posting comments on face book such as the following “** Do me a favour: please hover over my name here, wait for the box to load and then hover over the "Subscribe" link. Then uncheck the "Comments and likes" choice. I would rather my comments on friends' posts not be made public. Thanks **” My response to that is “NO! NO NO NO NO NO!.. I have god knows how many friends on my face book page (I have checked and I can’t quickly see that number) and I am NOT going to individually check your names and remove you from the feed. That’s not how you fix the problem. If you don’t like the fact that I won’t do this for you and you are really insistent that you don’t want ME reading those posts then please 1) send me a message to tell me you are removing me from your face book page and then 2) remove me from your face book page OR 3) accept that I’m not actually going to do anything nefarious with that information and that I’m ignoring it and that its actually annoying me more than its annoying you and then move on. I’m sorry but that meme is just not the solution to the problem.
The second solution: There’s a number of browser plug ins that do various from munching that removes the particular frame/script which produces this information. I could install that and it would remove that scrolling feed. Unfortunately this seems to ALSO remove the chat functionality from the page or it installs script blocking stuff in the browser which makes it do funky annoying other stuff and unreliably at that. I’m just not going to mess with that stuff to again, try and fix a problem produced by developers who think they know better.
As a friend posted something along the lines of “Facebook! Quick! Check your codebase! It looks like your developers may have taken a dump in it!”
What is the end result of this whole face book code problem? 1) A lot of friends have started posting to live journal again and 2) my non techno literate friends have begun to use Google+. These are the people who weren’t going to move because it was just too hard. They are now seeing Google plus as the solution. It might not be perfect but it’s at least working for the moment.
Facebook, thank you for helping me towards helping me deal with my Facebook addiction by making me want to use your site less. Isn’t that counterproductive??? The only feature that I still want to REALLYT use is the events feature for booking things in. When Google+ gets that organised in a similar way to Facebook’s integrated events then I think The Google+ toolset will be complete.
Also, I have seen way more eloquent posts from various friends about the changes on face book. But I still want to have a whinge.
Over the years Facebook has had various changes that people have complained about when they have been implemented and then slowly got used to them. In hindsight the changes Facebook have previously made have actually been reasonably okay, to the point that I can barely remember what those changes actually were. The largest change was their chat system and putting the list of friends down the right hand site. Again, a quite innocuous change that is easily ignored. Even the news feed changes they made were reasonably optional. I was able to revert the feed to how I like it, seeing my friend’s status updates in order and being able to quickly scroll through and get an update of what has happened in the last time I haven’t been online.
There are two major changes to face book that I have seen that annoy me. One reduces the usability for me from “really useful to keep in touch with all my friends” to “I have a quick scroll through get the random updates and hope I haven’t missed anything important” The other changes is less of a useability issue for me and more of a “WTF did they do that? I can see your underwear!” Kind of an issue.
Issue one: The news feed is no longer chronological from top of page to bottom as you scroll. Previously the post at the top would be the latest update that had hit the system from a few minutes ago or seconds. NOW looking at my webpage, several top stories from 8 hours ago, and then a couple from 20 minutes ago and then it bounces back 2 hours 4 hours etc... From NOW to 8 hours ago there are 3 posts. My friends list is usually way more active than that even at stupid A’M’s in the morning. I can only assume that the special algorithm Facebook is using to work out what posts should be important to me actually degrade most of the posts my friends are making so they are flagged as “really unimportant” (The algorithm appears to operate on comment length. SO If people post LONG comments to a update that update will get a higher priority in the “top story” window... and the more comments and the longer their comments are, the longer that story is in the top post category or so it seems) (and I have just refreshed my page and got a whole lot of comments from the last hour just come through, even though I have regularly been refreshing this page as I write this post)
This annoys me… A LOT. I will decide what’s important to me. If a friend is posting rude posts about their genatalia, I want to be able to DECIDE that I block that post. I don’t want the post to be buried automatically.
This means that I am now missing most of my friend’s updates. The feed is, as of now, unreliable and suspect. This is my MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR complaint about the new Facebook
Issue two: This is less of an ISSUE for me and more of a concern. On the right hand side of the face book window there is a scrolling feed which is similar to a twitter feed. This feed shows everything real-time of what your friends are writing on other peoples walls. If James posts on Andrews’s wall that he had a great time at the strippers last night, I will see a message in my feed telling me that James made that comment.
WHY Facebook? Why is this relevant to me and how is this not an itsy privacy issue, albeit it a smoke and mirrors privacy by obscurity issue?
I have seen a number of methods of dealing with this, none of them ideal and none of them I will implement.
The First Solution: There is an option to individually select people and select an option for each of them that says effectively “don’t show this users posts in your instant feed”. People are posting comments on face book such as the following “** Do me a favour: please hover over my name here, wait for the box to load and then hover over the "Subscribe" link. Then uncheck the "Comments and likes" choice. I would rather my comments on friends' posts not be made public. Thanks **” My response to that is “NO! NO NO NO NO NO!.. I have god knows how many friends on my face book page (I have checked and I can’t quickly see that number) and I am NOT going to individually check your names and remove you from the feed. That’s not how you fix the problem. If you don’t like the fact that I won’t do this for you and you are really insistent that you don’t want ME reading those posts then please 1) send me a message to tell me you are removing me from your face book page and then 2) remove me from your face book page OR 3) accept that I’m not actually going to do anything nefarious with that information and that I’m ignoring it and that its actually annoying me more than its annoying you and then move on. I’m sorry but that meme is just not the solution to the problem.
The second solution: There’s a number of browser plug ins that do various from munching that removes the particular frame/script which produces this information. I could install that and it would remove that scrolling feed. Unfortunately this seems to ALSO remove the chat functionality from the page or it installs script blocking stuff in the browser which makes it do funky annoying other stuff and unreliably at that. I’m just not going to mess with that stuff to again, try and fix a problem produced by developers who think they know better.
As a friend posted something along the lines of “Facebook! Quick! Check your codebase! It looks like your developers may have taken a dump in it!”
What is the end result of this whole face book code problem? 1) A lot of friends have started posting to live journal again and 2) my non techno literate friends have begun to use Google+. These are the people who weren’t going to move because it was just too hard. They are now seeing Google plus as the solution. It might not be perfect but it’s at least working for the moment.
Facebook, thank you for helping me towards helping me deal with my Facebook addiction by making me want to use your site less. Isn’t that counterproductive??? The only feature that I still want to REALLYT use is the events feature for booking things in. When Google+ gets that organised in a similar way to Facebook’s integrated events then I think The Google+ toolset will be complete.