Saturday, June 18, 2011

5 Things I Hate about Facebook


1) The way the page reformats itself, so that the words you're reading suddenly whisk themselves off the page and you have to go searching for them.

2) The way the security rules change without warning whenever Mark Zuckerberg or his minions get a wild hair AND the way they default the new settings to whatever benefits the Facebook empire.

A guy at work wrote an app on Friday to go out to the College's Facebook page and gather all the comments into a file so we would write software to look for keywords that would allow us to quickly respond to students having problems. He's a smart guy, and he got it working pretty quickly. He came back in Monday to find that, over the weekend, Facebook had completely redone the security rules around the API (application program interface) and it didn't work anymore. He spent 4 days getting it to function again.

3) The way the comment box squats on top of stuff I'M TRYING TO READ, DAMMIT!

4) The way the message page now keeps a full freaking history of every word I've ever exchanged with anyone. Some things in life are trivial. Do we have to track them FOREVER???

5) In general, the way the interface changes without warning. Today, you make a new paragraph by pressing "Enter." Tomorrow, pressing "Enter" publishes your comment whether you were ready or not. And the next, it's back the way it was.

Here's a novel idea: how about treating Facebook like it's a real piece of software in the real world instead of something college kids are playing with in their dorm room? If you're interested, Mark, there are published best practices for supporting software that will tell you how to do that.

(BTW--sorry for being such an ungrateful bitch and thanks for letting me use your software for free.)

9 comments:

  1. Right on!!!

    So often I think it's me, or my computer that is doing something wrong. I've experienced all of those things.

    And sometimes during the frustration, I wonder if I was better off before I knew so much shit about everyone!

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  2. Seconded on all counts! Grow up, Facebook...

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  3. You have every right to be upset...it bugs me too...often I go in and delete my comments/status from time to time, so no one is overwhelmed with my ramblings...which I swore facebook would not make me do...like 'Chillaxin' comments from friends

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  4. I loved reading this because I thought it was just me.

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  5. You reassure me that I have been well advised not to go anywhere near it.

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  6. I have over 4000 friends - its all in how you manage it - I try not to let things overwhelm me so as a result - they dont. If you dont like Facebook dont use it - no one is making you.

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  7. I just hate random format changes in general.

    I also not fond of some of my "friends" status updates. Way too many post their political views in hateful ways for my taste.

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