Facebook: A Rant

I was unfortunately in one of the first batches of users to get the new Facebook site enforced. Well I hate it, and regardless of what the people who like it say, it is not because I hate change. It is a giant step backwards in my opinion.

The last feature Facebook introduced was one that I really liked, Live Feed. I much prefer having data updated for me and loathe pressing F5 these days. I think having a BlackBerry for so long has very much made take pushed data for granted. Well thank you so much Mr Facebook for removing that useful feature. If you think I’m going to press F5 all day long you are mistaken. The lack of Live Feed is a deal breaker for me. It’s made Facebook much less appealing. Sure it’s fine to still add friends and I have their status updates on an RSS feed I can read elsewhere, but why would I bother visiting the website now? To be honest an RSS feed of my friends stream would be perfect.

There is another highly annoying change to user’s walls too. Instead of having each action listed in the order they happened, only status updates and wall messages have timestamps. Every other action is lumped together in a block completely out of sync. Making it impossible to look at a wall and see how conversations and actions have taken place. Apparently this makes it look more like Twitter, at first I vehemently disagreed with this, but then realised I wouldn’t really know… Because I hate the Twitter website with a passion and so don’t ever use it!

I’ve gone into my Facebook settings and told it to e-mail me for pretty much everything I’d ever care to know about. I still check my friends updates through RSS or the new TweetDeck. I still have Live Feed on my mobile versions so continue to use that for now. I think ultimately though what I’d really like is a customizable Facebook application, or even a website along the same lines as TweeTree is for Twitter. Whether it would ever happen? I don’t know, but they’re going to have to do something to keep me using their service.