Will it script?

Facebook is in theory a great way of keeping in touch with old friends and relatives. You can, with a low amount of work, find people that you’ve since long lost contact with and get up to date with what they have been doing. And there are things that work really well:

• Finding friends
• Messages
• Events

Messages works great as a compliment for email. People change their phone number and email from time to time, but the idea of Facebook is that their profile stays the same, so it’s easy to communicate as long as you remember their names.

Events are an efficient way of organizing get-togethers with a group of people. They also synchronize with Caldav compatible calendars, which can be immensely useful.

Note that the primary way of experiencing Facebook, the News feed, was not present on that list. Instead, it is at the very center of what is wrong with Facebook. And that’s not all:

• The main part of it has no real purpose, or ..
• .. it solves a problem that doesn’t exist.
• Settings everywhere, but what do they do?
• Privacy issues now and historically; in other words trust.
• Likes have no meaning
• The iOS app is barely usable
• Tedious controlling who sees what

What is the purpose of Facebook? What is it Facebook is trying to solve? One of the problems with Facebook is that tries too hard to do too many things. I recall when all statuses where prefixed with “is”. It forced people to think about what they wrote. A status update was supposed to be just that: an update of your current status. You would get updated on relationship changes, if someone found a new friend etc. Nowadays the News Feed is pretty much a shoutbox for everything. The News feed of Facebook is like the timeline of Twitter, but with more noise. You get a served a various mix of spontaneous things people feel an urge to share mixed with Youtube videos, webpage links etcetera. “But you can customize what you see” some will say. Sure, you can, but the updates still lack a purpose, they don’t solve any problem I had. This also brings me to the second thing that is wrong with Facebook: settings.

It is damn near impossible to actually get a grip on all settings. They aren’t easy to find, and they are even harder to understand. To make things worse, settings seem to move around a lot. What could be found in one place one day requires a bit of searching to locate the next day. As an example, I went to try to filter my News Feed; first of, it required me to set what I wanted to see for every single contact in among my friends. This took a while, and even though I patiently did this I still have no idea what effect it has. Terms like “Most updates” or “Only Important” mean very little to me. Important to whom? What updated do I not get to see? If I like something, does it get more important to others? Imagine the following scenario: If someone posts a link to an article on how a father killed his children, should I like that update in order for it to be counted as important for others?

Which brings us to the next issue in the list. Likes: they have no meaning. In the beginning, when Status Updates where Status Updates and relationship changes where a big part of the content of Facebook the meaning of the Like button was clear.

“Xx Yy is planning a trip to Kenya”.
“Oh, Kenya. That sounds like a great trip, I’ll like it.”

Along with the noise that followed during design changes, the meaning of Likes vanished and they are in many cases pointless today.

Just like Google, Facebook choose to not to make a native app for iOS. Instead they opted for a native wrapper for a web app, which likely is to blame for its flaws. The latest version is blessed with an irrational behavior which drives me insane. Most of the times when I tap something I end up somewhere else than intended. Say for example that I try to look at the comments for a status. Most of the times I end up at the list of my friends, but I have ended up at completely different posts as well. This combined with a sluggish performance makes the app annoying to use, something you really don’t want.

Like Google+, Facebook forces the user to remember where he/she left off. Instead of returning to the last post you read you are presented with the most current posts, sorted in descending order (presuming you don’t prefer getting highlighted stories first, which is even worse in this aspect). It puts the responsibility of remembering the posts read on the user. Compare this with most Twitter clients, who positions you on the tweet you read last (this can also be synchronized cross clients by using the service Tweetmarker.

Finally, Facebook has the same problem as Google+: organizing your contacts takes time and energy. Facebook has a slight advantage with its smart lists; the problem with those is that they force information into your friends profiles if you try to add someone to a list. If you don’t use them you’re left to creating your own lists, which leaves you with the same problem as Google+ and their circles: how do you decide who goes where? And above all, it isn’t fun sitting for hours organizing people.