I do several things when I wake up in the morning. Several of them involve my computer.
1. Press Snooze
2. Press Snooze
3. Stare at Ceiling
4. Check Email / Twitter / Facebook / Fark
6. Look Outside Window for Soviets / Zombies / Satin-Clad Nymphs
7. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
The rest of my AM routine is a variable combination of showering, pop-tarts, and dwelling on my past.
I got to the “Internet” part this morning, and let out a grunt of frustration; Facebook changed their homepage again, for the 9,000th time in less than a year. ”The new home page” has been in the pipe for a while now. Typically, things become nicer when they’re updated, like the new iPod Shuffle or Xbox 360 OS. New features, new functionality.
Mark Zuckerberg and his posse of Facebook cronies, on the other hand, sit around their carbon-fiber conference table and have the following conversation:
MZ: “As you all know, the essence of Web2.0 lies in usability and the ‘architecture of participation.’ Our strategy has always been to make major updates to Facebook which are universally hated by our users, who create groups devoted to how shitty our site is. See, when our members attempt to actually get ’50,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK,’ we actually draw more traffic.
Cronie: “Of course, by the time they get that many people in the group, they’ve forgotten what they were upset about in the first place.”
MZ: “Exactly. By creating an endless, self-serving cycle of shit, we make ourselves the common enemy of the people. It’s the most effective participatory community in existence: one based entirely on people’s bitching. Last month’s ToS update was just too effective; I guess our users don’t want us to take ownership of their information, even though we practically own most of them.”
Cronie 2: “But we’ve already removed filters, browsing, sorting, network statistics, searching by major, and generally made the site crowd the browser window with huge amounts of crap, thereby completely eliminating anyone who has a netbook from viewing it…how can we make Facebook even more useless, but doubly addictive?”
MZ: “Let’s just make it look and behave exactly like Twitter.”
To his credit, Gardner Campbell actually got me thinking about this when he posted about the alarming similarity to Facebook this morning.
I’m going to post screenshots here; I want you to notice that they use the same font.
twitter sample
facebook sample
Facebook, again, goes the extra mile, and fills the page with more clutter than I, or any mortal, can comprehend, and I have a widescreen laptop.
i've seen better finger painting
You actually have the option of hiding the people who show up in the twit…facebo..whatever the fuck it is…feed, too, which pisses me off as well, especially because you can’t hide the “suggestions” given to you by the actual site. If you don’t want me to show up in your feed, why are you friends with me? If you don’t even care what I write about in my FB posts, you’re not going to care when I get pinned by a statue. And if I did get pinned by a statue, I’d tweet about it first.
“about 2 die. crushed by marble dong. edwin, take xbox.”
Am I going to deactivate my Facebook account? No, but that shit sucks, and my reasons for going to Facebook have now been reduced to looking at Brad’s profile images and rejecting friend requests from people I knew in high school.
If anyone sees their name up on my screenshots and wants it removed, I’ll blur it out, but I think sanctity of name is complete BS. Just don’t unfriend me.
The ability to filter out people you don’t have an iota of caring about is the best new feature. Now you can friend EVERYONE and give them the illusion of inclusion. What? You accepted 458 requests over the last month and don’t know any of them? Use the Filter! And they’ll never know any better…
Facebook has ceased being even remotely close to real life.
I haven’t signed into Facebook in weeks, so this is news to me. But based on your screenshots….I kind of prefer facebook’s Twitter-like feed over Twitter’s. At least I prefer the greater functionality.
I wish brad would post his profile pictures in Twitter. I forgot about those usually being amusing.
Evan is my only REAL Facebook friend.
Evan – that was always a feature, it was under the little X on the news feed news post and you click “Less about this person”.
Now we’ve just lost the intuitive learning that the facebook newsfeed used to have where it showed you stories about people whos profiles you viewed the most. Instead we get a live feed with updates from everyone and are expected to be on 24/7 to not miss something, no daily summary at all.
this new facebook is a complete sack of shit, they have also raped the group pages which makes my life a pain for updating
over 500k members about it should warent at least a fucking opt out
sack of useless shit along with all other social networking sites if i didnt need to work on theses sites id have fucking abandoned them ages ago
Wow, Luke is almost as bitter as I am.