Twitter*koff*Facebook
For anyone who's wondering what the fuss is about the new Facebook style, this post puts it down far better than I would, in a pretty well measured and reasoned post and if there's a certain amount of annoyance bleeding through, well, the author has probably managed to justify it in the post itself.
( http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=57012358002 )
(Edit: I may be having trouble with the links - the full thing is c&ped in beneath the cut below in case the fixed links still don't work. Do go and have a look though - the comments and links qare worthwhile also.)
The new Facebook is broken. I can prove it.
[NOTE: On 25.mar.09, Facebook's Christopher Cox announced some upcoming changes to the new interface. My response to that is here. Long story short: I'm not terribly impressed.]
I'm one of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people desperately unhappy with the latest iteration of Facebook.
I know. Whatever, right?
But here's the thing ... it's getting a bit unsettling to see all the complaints dismissed with claims of "you just hate change" and the like. This isn't about hating change. I work for an interactive company whose job it is to create and/or improve existing websites. Change for the better doesn't bother me. In fact, I applaud it.
But this? Was just change for change's sake. Worst of all, it took away good, working functionality that people had come to love -- which is always a piss-poor idea.
I think the reason some people don't understand why the rest of us are so upset is simply because they don't realize what's gone now and what was added that didn't actually improve functionality. Once I point those things out to them, they usually get pretty irritated too.
If you're one of those people who doesn't get it or if you just have the vaguely uneasy feeling something is different but you're not quite sure what it is, here's my own list of what's now broken ...
The "live feed" is gone.
To me it was the beating heart of FB. To be able to see what my friends were doing in real-time was addictive and so much fun. This new "stream" crap is NOT in real-time (even though FB keeps saying it is -- do they not understand that having to refresh a page cancels out any concept of real-time?). On top of that, it isn't always in chronological order, and things randomly appear and disappear. When I comment on a friend's status, the comment will often disappear after the page is refreshed, only to appear again a few minutes later. If I had an itchy trigger finger, this would've resulted in a whole lot of double-posts.
Things in general just seem to have been running more slowly since the redesign. Previously I could upload photos from my phone and they'd show up in my mobile album almost immediately. Now? Two hours passed before a photo I uploaded appeared. Not exactly my idea of real-time (unless my uploads live in a different time zone than I do). The immediacy of things like uploads used to be part of what made FB tick.
They've removed the ability to see the things I wanted to see.
The live feed told me when people friended other people, joined groups, or RSVP'd to an event (to name only a few). The new stream doesn't show me any of that. Now the only way to see it is to go to each individual friend's profile page. Who has time for that? And isn't seeing that stuff part of social interactivity and a big reason why FB was so popular?
I mean, I can't count how many times I've found friends simply because OTHER friends found them first, joined a group I didn't know existed because a friend joined it first, or discovered a cool local event because a friend found it first. Unless I want to devote my days to checking out everyone's profile pages, that information is now lost, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of FB.
The "highlights" sidebar is pointless.
A giant chunk of screen real estate is now consumed with worthless crap over which I have no control. Okay, so maybe here is where I'll see that cool local event because five friends RSVP'd to it -- or maybe I won't because FB decided it wasn't relevant. And how many people have to respond to something before it's deemed a "highlight"? From what I've seen so far, it's completely arbitrary.
Those highlights also contain information about how many friends used an app, something about which I couldn't care less. Yet there's no way to collapse it or otherwise get rid of it. On top of that, I still have highlights showing that are now several days old and out of date (an event that has now passed, for example). And the point of that is ...?
There have also been some unintended consequences to not being able to get rid of what's in the highlights. One woman complained about not being able to delete things from the sidebar because a friend is also friends with her ex-husband. The friend tagged the ex in a photo and I guess the photo was popular enough to wind up in the ex-wife's highlights. So now every time she signs on, there's a photo of her ex-husband waiting to greet her. Awesome!
Another person complained about the same highlights sidebar because several friends had joined a group that uses an X-rated photo for its logo. Having several friends join a group apparently puts the group and its logo in the highlights. She is now greeted with said explicit photo every time she signs on, with no way to get rid of it. Oops.
The new stream is full of nonsense I don't want to see with no way to filter it out.
In the past few days I've been treated to pages and pages of giant notifications telling me friends sent each other invisible Easter Eggs or Peeps or St. Patty's Day clovers or what have you -- and there's an individual notification for EVERY SINGLE PERSON they sent it to. One right after the other. So an entire page is now consumed with it.
Another example (and a hilarious one at that) of this going awry: Among the many worthless apps on FB, there is apparently one called "big wet boobs." So a particular FB user signed on one morning to find his home page covered with dozens and dozens of entries showing "Bob sent so-and-so Big Wet Boobs." Good morning, indeed.
In addition, a friend's child recently went to the zoo and my friend was uploading mobile photos while they were gone. Instead of them showing up in thumbnails or grouped together (as was the habit of the old FB when photos were uploaded one right after the other), each one appeared individually in my stream and each notification was freakin' huge. So I had this enormous scrolling page of pictures rather than just a simple blurb w/thumbnails that I had the option of clicking to see.
They've removed the cool little "see more/see less" stories option.
Previously, when someone took a quiz or sent the aforementioned virtual gifts to a bunch of folks, a notification showed up on my home page. If I didn't want to see that stuff on my page, I had the option of clicking to the right of it and selecting the option of seeing less of that particular kind of story. It was kind of like TiVo's "thumbs up/thumbs down" thing -- FB sort of learned what I liked and what I didn't, and displayed stuff accordingly.
The only option I have now is to entirely remove the ability of a PERSON to post to my stream. That sucks. I don't want to stop seeing updates from friends just because they had some time to kill and took 20 quizzes I may not care about (or felt compelled to send their buddies big wet boobs). But if I want the notifications to stop, I have to remove that person rather than being able to just tell the system not to show me quiz results or gifts anymore. Really bad filtering feature to remove.
They've removed the ability to "see more/see less" from people in general.
Some people treat their statuses like a running stream of consciousness or frequently post random other crap I don't care about. Before, I could click to the right and choose to see less from that person (or, if it was a good friend or someone I enjoyed, I could choose to see more from that person). No more. Now all I can do is, again, remove their ability to post to the stream altogether. If I'm going to do that, why bother having them as friends at all?
It's like FB is telling me I have to be besties with all my friends or ignore them entirely. Friendships in real-life don't work that way, and FB used to understand that.
Wall posts (in their entirety) now go into everyone's streams.
Previously, if a friend posted to a wall, you'd just get a nice little one-line blurb about it. If you wanted to go read the post, you could. Now? The post itself shows up in everyone's stream (and looks the same as a status update but I'll get to that in a minute). It's not that there was any expectation of privacy, it's that I don't want all 100 of my friends to be subjected to a conversation in which they didn't ask to be included.
For example, I recently had a cold and a friend posted on my wall to ask how I was feeling. I responded and then she responded and it was lovely and all, but why must that exchange be forced into everyone's streams?
The result of this is I'm now a whole lot less inclined to post to anyone's walls (or even to reply to posts on my own wall) for fear of annoying my other friends or that person's other friends -- who may then feel forced to opt out of seeing ANYTHING from us anymore to make the posts stop (see above). Again, this totally defeats the purpose of social networking.
The new "publisher" is not user-friendly.
I don't know why they felt the need to change this. It made sense to me to have a spot on the top of all pages where I could see my current status and quickly change it. If I wanted to post links, video, etc to my own page, I first had to go to my profile page and choose what type of post it was from the simple little list below the status bar. This was not complicated at all.
Now? I can't even see my own status unless I go to my profile page, for starters. So changing it from anywhere BUT there really doesn't make much sense. FB also used to have a very handy starter prompt saying Shauna is ... If I wanted to change the verb, I could, but at least I'd see exactly how the finished status would look -- like Shauna hates the new FB. Now it's just blank with no prompt at all. (Several people I know hate this because they looked like simpletons when responding to the new "what's on your mind?" question -- one person wrote "groceries" so it came out Bob Smith groceries. Heh.) The prompt was also useful because you knew you were posting a status update and not a link or anything else, a confusion that seems a whole lot more common since the redesign.
Speaking of links ... posting a link to my own page used to be a very simple task. I'd go to my profile page, select link, paste the link in, and FB would go retrieve where it came from and such. Then I could add my own comments if I wanted to and click "share." Done and done. It was intuitive and made sense.
Posting a link now requires clicking in the blank field to get the link option to show up at all (nice user-interface work, guys). Then you click link. Then after pasting it in, the only button option is labeled "attach." This threw me because I'm not attaching a link like you attach a photo to an email, so why is it called attach? (I actually abandoned my first link attempt because I was sure I'd screwed up somewhere, but no, that's just what it's called now.) Only after "attaching" the link does it retrieve the site info and then light up the "share" button for you to actually post the link. Why the two differently-named buttons?
We also used to have the option of showing a photo with the link or choosing not to. No more. So when you post a link, a big whopping two-inch story shows up in everyone's stream. Nice!
They've removed the "full story/short/one line" option from stories.
Tying in with the point above, you can no longer select how stories appear when you post them. So if I'm posting a link or a note or whatever, I can't choose how big the notifications will be in someone's stream. They're gonna be big, honkin', screen-real-estate-grabbin
g stories. I liked having the option of only showing a couple lines or even just one line that said "Shauna posted a new note entitled Why I Hate Facebook." If people wanted to see more, they could do so. If not, it was easily ignored. Again, this makes me a lot less likely to post things. I don't want to annoy people.
The overall appearance is clunky and not intuitive.
Now I'll talk about how the page looks. There used to be differences in the font sizes and colors depending on what type of activity it was. Status updates were big and bold, while stories were in a smaller regular font. Little icons next to the stories told you what it was -- there was an icon for a friending that had taken place, another icon for when someone added an event to a calendar, another for a link, another for a note, and so on. As I said before, most of that stuff isn't even shown anymore (which sucks) but what IS shown is all in the same big bold font. Even wall posts show up that way instead of being clearly-defined like they used to be.
Also, they've removed the time stamps from much of the activity on the profile pages. Now there's just a little cluster marked "recent activity." Not a huge deal but why remove the time stamps when they were already there before?
And although this is just a visual preference (rather than a UI flaw), I don't like that FB now puts people's profile photos next to every entry on the home page. They just clutter things up. Since FB uses real names for everyone, I don't need pictures to remind me who they are. And don't get me started on the circa-2003 rounded corners on all the photos. The whole thing just makes the page look amateurish. (Then again, I have the "classic view" set on Windows XP too because the regular XP looks cartoony to me, so take that for whatever it's worth.)
And there you have my major gripes.
Really, I don't understand why FB seems to be trying so hard to be Twitter. They're two totally different services. In fact, the status updates on FB basically ARE tweets, so FB had that AND all the other great functionality it used to offer. Now it's just a glorified Twitter. If I wanted to be on Twitter, I would be. I see why it's popular, but FB is more popular -- for a reason. With this latest incarnation, though, people like me fail to see many benefits in even using it anymore.
The bottom line is this: FB should be leading, not following. For them to do otherwise smacks of desperation -- and is really rather embarrassing.
-Shauna Wright
------------
I've set the permissions on this note to "everyone" so that anyone can read it. Feel free to share it with non-believers or link to it if you wish (the direct URL is http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=57012358002 or http://tinyurl.com/ccbypt).
Other articles/pages you may want to read:
Official FB pages:
Mark Zuckerberg's FB page (add yourself as a fan and you'll be able to comment on his status updates about the new FB)
FB's elusive feedback page (they think we'll get used to the changes - so every day, send a note detailing one feature you miss)
FB Mobile's live feed (kinda buggy and it doesn't work exactly the same as the old live feed, but still shows friendings/groups joined/etc)
The comments on two FB employee blogs (keep in mind only the latest 100 comments will display)
Notes/apps from other FB members:
Twitbook: How to get facebook to realize their mistake (good opinion piece with lots of links and action items)
Why The "Great Facebook Mistake of 2009" Bothers Me So Much (Elizabeth gets right to the heart of the matter)
Vote on the New Facebook Layout (no idea if this will even have an impact but eh, what the hell)
( http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=57012358002 )
(Edit: I may be having trouble with the links - the full thing is c&ped in beneath the cut below in case the fixed links still don't work. Do go and have a look though - the comments and links qare worthwhile also.)
The new Facebook is broken. I can prove it.
[NOTE: On 25.mar.09, Facebook's Christopher Cox announced some upcoming changes to the new interface. My response to that is here. Long story short: I'm not terribly impressed.]
I'm one of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people desperately unhappy with the latest iteration of Facebook.
I know. Whatever, right?
But here's the thing ... it's getting a bit unsettling to see all the complaints dismissed with claims of "you just hate change" and the like. This isn't about hating change. I work for an interactive company whose job it is to create and/or improve existing websites. Change for the better doesn't bother me. In fact, I applaud it.
But this? Was just change for change's sake. Worst of all, it took away good, working functionality that people had come to love -- which is always a piss-poor idea.
I think the reason some people don't understand why the rest of us are so upset is simply because they don't realize what's gone now and what was added that didn't actually improve functionality. Once I point those things out to them, they usually get pretty irritated too.
If you're one of those people who doesn't get it or if you just have the vaguely uneasy feeling something is different but you're not quite sure what it is, here's my own list of what's now broken ...
The "live feed" is gone.
To me it was the beating heart of FB. To be able to see what my friends were doing in real-time was addictive and so much fun. This new "stream" crap is NOT in real-time (even though FB keeps saying it is -- do they not understand that having to refresh a page cancels out any concept of real-time?). On top of that, it isn't always in chronological order, and things randomly appear and disappear. When I comment on a friend's status, the comment will often disappear after the page is refreshed, only to appear again a few minutes later. If I had an itchy trigger finger, this would've resulted in a whole lot of double-posts.
Things in general just seem to have been running more slowly since the redesign. Previously I could upload photos from my phone and they'd show up in my mobile album almost immediately. Now? Two hours passed before a photo I uploaded appeared. Not exactly my idea of real-time (unless my uploads live in a different time zone than I do). The immediacy of things like uploads used to be part of what made FB tick.
They've removed the ability to see the things I wanted to see.
The live feed told me when people friended other people, joined groups, or RSVP'd to an event (to name only a few). The new stream doesn't show me any of that. Now the only way to see it is to go to each individual friend's profile page. Who has time for that? And isn't seeing that stuff part of social interactivity and a big reason why FB was so popular?
I mean, I can't count how many times I've found friends simply because OTHER friends found them first, joined a group I didn't know existed because a friend joined it first, or discovered a cool local event because a friend found it first. Unless I want to devote my days to checking out everyone's profile pages, that information is now lost, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of FB.
The "highlights" sidebar is pointless.
A giant chunk of screen real estate is now consumed with worthless crap over which I have no control. Okay, so maybe here is where I'll see that cool local event because five friends RSVP'd to it -- or maybe I won't because FB decided it wasn't relevant. And how many people have to respond to something before it's deemed a "highlight"? From what I've seen so far, it's completely arbitrary.
Those highlights also contain information about how many friends used an app, something about which I couldn't care less. Yet there's no way to collapse it or otherwise get rid of it. On top of that, I still have highlights showing that are now several days old and out of date (an event that has now passed, for example). And the point of that is ...?
There have also been some unintended consequences to not being able to get rid of what's in the highlights. One woman complained about not being able to delete things from the sidebar because a friend is also friends with her ex-husband. The friend tagged the ex in a photo and I guess the photo was popular enough to wind up in the ex-wife's highlights. So now every time she signs on, there's a photo of her ex-husband waiting to greet her. Awesome!
Another person complained about the same highlights sidebar because several friends had joined a group that uses an X-rated photo for its logo. Having several friends join a group apparently puts the group and its logo in the highlights. She is now greeted with said explicit photo every time she signs on, with no way to get rid of it. Oops.
The new stream is full of nonsense I don't want to see with no way to filter it out.
In the past few days I've been treated to pages and pages of giant notifications telling me friends sent each other invisible Easter Eggs or Peeps or St. Patty's Day clovers or what have you -- and there's an individual notification for EVERY SINGLE PERSON they sent it to. One right after the other. So an entire page is now consumed with it.
Another example (and a hilarious one at that) of this going awry: Among the many worthless apps on FB, there is apparently one called "big wet boobs." So a particular FB user signed on one morning to find his home page covered with dozens and dozens of entries showing "Bob sent so-and-so Big Wet Boobs." Good morning, indeed.
In addition, a friend's child recently went to the zoo and my friend was uploading mobile photos while they were gone. Instead of them showing up in thumbnails or grouped together (as was the habit of the old FB when photos were uploaded one right after the other), each one appeared individually in my stream and each notification was freakin' huge. So I had this enormous scrolling page of pictures rather than just a simple blurb w/thumbnails that I had the option of clicking to see.
They've removed the cool little "see more/see less" stories option.
Previously, when someone took a quiz or sent the aforementioned virtual gifts to a bunch of folks, a notification showed up on my home page. If I didn't want to see that stuff on my page, I had the option of clicking to the right of it and selecting the option of seeing less of that particular kind of story. It was kind of like TiVo's "thumbs up/thumbs down" thing -- FB sort of learned what I liked and what I didn't, and displayed stuff accordingly.
The only option I have now is to entirely remove the ability of a PERSON to post to my stream. That sucks. I don't want to stop seeing updates from friends just because they had some time to kill and took 20 quizzes I may not care about (or felt compelled to send their buddies big wet boobs). But if I want the notifications to stop, I have to remove that person rather than being able to just tell the system not to show me quiz results or gifts anymore. Really bad filtering feature to remove.
They've removed the ability to "see more/see less" from people in general.
Some people treat their statuses like a running stream of consciousness or frequently post random other crap I don't care about. Before, I could click to the right and choose to see less from that person (or, if it was a good friend or someone I enjoyed, I could choose to see more from that person). No more. Now all I can do is, again, remove their ability to post to the stream altogether. If I'm going to do that, why bother having them as friends at all?
It's like FB is telling me I have to be besties with all my friends or ignore them entirely. Friendships in real-life don't work that way, and FB used to understand that.
Wall posts (in their entirety) now go into everyone's streams.
Previously, if a friend posted to a wall, you'd just get a nice little one-line blurb about it. If you wanted to go read the post, you could. Now? The post itself shows up in everyone's stream (and looks the same as a status update but I'll get to that in a minute). It's not that there was any expectation of privacy, it's that I don't want all 100 of my friends to be subjected to a conversation in which they didn't ask to be included.
For example, I recently had a cold and a friend posted on my wall to ask how I was feeling. I responded and then she responded and it was lovely and all, but why must that exchange be forced into everyone's streams?
The result of this is I'm now a whole lot less inclined to post to anyone's walls (or even to reply to posts on my own wall) for fear of annoying my other friends or that person's other friends -- who may then feel forced to opt out of seeing ANYTHING from us anymore to make the posts stop (see above). Again, this totally defeats the purpose of social networking.
The new "publisher" is not user-friendly.
I don't know why they felt the need to change this. It made sense to me to have a spot on the top of all pages where I could see my current status and quickly change it. If I wanted to post links, video, etc to my own page, I first had to go to my profile page and choose what type of post it was from the simple little list below the status bar. This was not complicated at all.
Now? I can't even see my own status unless I go to my profile page, for starters. So changing it from anywhere BUT there really doesn't make much sense. FB also used to have a very handy starter prompt saying Shauna is ... If I wanted to change the verb, I could, but at least I'd see exactly how the finished status would look -- like Shauna hates the new FB. Now it's just blank with no prompt at all. (Several people I know hate this because they looked like simpletons when responding to the new "what's on your mind?" question -- one person wrote "groceries" so it came out Bob Smith groceries. Heh.) The prompt was also useful because you knew you were posting a status update and not a link or anything else, a confusion that seems a whole lot more common since the redesign.
Speaking of links ... posting a link to my own page used to be a very simple task. I'd go to my profile page, select link, paste the link in, and FB would go retrieve where it came from and such. Then I could add my own comments if I wanted to and click "share." Done and done. It was intuitive and made sense.
Posting a link now requires clicking in the blank field to get the link option to show up at all (nice user-interface work, guys). Then you click link. Then after pasting it in, the only button option is labeled "attach." This threw me because I'm not attaching a link like you attach a photo to an email, so why is it called attach? (I actually abandoned my first link attempt because I was sure I'd screwed up somewhere, but no, that's just what it's called now.) Only after "attaching" the link does it retrieve the site info and then light up the "share" button for you to actually post the link. Why the two differently-named buttons?
We also used to have the option of showing a photo with the link or choosing not to. No more. So when you post a link, a big whopping two-inch story shows up in everyone's stream. Nice!
They've removed the "full story/short/one line" option from stories.
Tying in with the point above, you can no longer select how stories appear when you post them. So if I'm posting a link or a note or whatever, I can't choose how big the notifications will be in someone's stream. They're gonna be big, honkin', screen-real-estate-grabbin
g stories. I liked having the option of only showing a couple lines or even just one line that said "Shauna posted a new note entitled Why I Hate Facebook." If people wanted to see more, they could do so. If not, it was easily ignored. Again, this makes me a lot less likely to post things. I don't want to annoy people.
The overall appearance is clunky and not intuitive.
Now I'll talk about how the page looks. There used to be differences in the font sizes and colors depending on what type of activity it was. Status updates were big and bold, while stories were in a smaller regular font. Little icons next to the stories told you what it was -- there was an icon for a friending that had taken place, another icon for when someone added an event to a calendar, another for a link, another for a note, and so on. As I said before, most of that stuff isn't even shown anymore (which sucks) but what IS shown is all in the same big bold font. Even wall posts show up that way instead of being clearly-defined like they used to be.
Also, they've removed the time stamps from much of the activity on the profile pages. Now there's just a little cluster marked "recent activity." Not a huge deal but why remove the time stamps when they were already there before?
And although this is just a visual preference (rather than a UI flaw), I don't like that FB now puts people's profile photos next to every entry on the home page. They just clutter things up. Since FB uses real names for everyone, I don't need pictures to remind me who they are. And don't get me started on the circa-2003 rounded corners on all the photos. The whole thing just makes the page look amateurish. (Then again, I have the "classic view" set on Windows XP too because the regular XP looks cartoony to me, so take that for whatever it's worth.)
And there you have my major gripes.
Really, I don't understand why FB seems to be trying so hard to be Twitter. They're two totally different services. In fact, the status updates on FB basically ARE tweets, so FB had that AND all the other great functionality it used to offer. Now it's just a glorified Twitter. If I wanted to be on Twitter, I would be. I see why it's popular, but FB is more popular -- for a reason. With this latest incarnation, though, people like me fail to see many benefits in even using it anymore.
The bottom line is this: FB should be leading, not following. For them to do otherwise smacks of desperation -- and is really rather embarrassing.
-Shauna Wright
------------
I've set the permissions on this note to "everyone" so that anyone can read it. Feel free to share it with non-believers or link to it if you wish (the direct URL is http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=57012358002 or http://tinyurl.com/ccbypt).
Other articles/pages you may want to read:
Official FB pages:
Mark Zuckerberg's FB page (add yourself as a fan and you'll be able to comment on his status updates about the new FB)
FB's elusive feedback page (they think we'll get used to the changes - so every day, send a note detailing one feature you miss)
FB Mobile's live feed (kinda buggy and it doesn't work exactly the same as the old live feed, but still shows friendings/groups joined/etc)
The comments on two FB employee blogs (keep in mind only the latest 100 comments will display)
Notes/apps from other FB members:
Twitbook: How to get facebook to realize their mistake (good opinion piece with lots of links and action items)
Why The "Great Facebook Mistake of 2009" Bothers Me So Much (Elizabeth gets right to the heart of the matter)
Vote on the New Facebook Layout (no idea if this will even have an impact but eh, what the hell)