tollie.org/blog thoughts and reflections of Tollie Williams

Facebook Fail

Excepted from myself on Facebook:

The social graph model had a 10x more interesting Home feed. The twitter-clone home stream is almost completely uninteresting and not Facebook.

The highlights preserve some of the interesting aspects of the old home feed, but they are too few, too cluttered, and no longer able to be "tweaked" with sliders or "less of" links.

Additionally, the new home stream lacks filters for profile changes like groups, relationship statuses, and interests.

Basically, my iPhone has become my only interesting way to use Facebook, as it still gives me the social graph model of the Home feed-- don't screw it up, and you should *really* consider revamping the "new" twitter clone to be less of a clone, and more true to what kept Facebook interesting.

Go here for ways to take action: http://bit.ly/2Oz3i (links to Facebook note).

And don't forget to use http://iphone.facebook.com - maybe, hopefully, they'll see the spike in traffic to that website from non-iPhone browsers.

UPDATE: In my continuing campaign to get Facebook to fix the "great mistake of 09", I ended up writing out my thoughts in bullet points. Here they are:

*** 1: The new design didn't add significant functionality. ***

1a- The old design already had live updates (actually live though), and filtering by friend group, status, photos, etc.

1b- The only "new" functionality was to filter by 3rd party applications - most of which are rubbish.

1c- Indeed, the old functionality of being able to dial up or down what and who you found interesting - it's gone.

*** 2: The new design is dumb, rather than intelligent. ***

2a- The old "social graph" algorithm worked for me. It digested hundreds of friends and thousands of "data" into a digestible, interesting, useful home page.

2b- The new stream is always the last hour, and if I didn't block every 3rd party app I find, it would probably be littered with quizzed and sheep throwing. Further, since I check Facebook late at the end of the day, my home stream is almost exclusively west coast people, instead of my local friends who are most interesting to me.

2c- Twitter is about the "stream", it was founded as a micro-blog. Facebook is NOT about the stream - it was founded as, and ought to be, an intelligent address book that functions like a yearbook, collecting memories with photos, and your friends scribbled notes on the inside "walls" of the book.

MOST IMPORTANT TO ME:
*** 3: The new design reverts Facebook back to 2005. ***

3a- Profile changes (groups joined, relationship status, interest changes) are left completely unpublished, and thus we're left having to go profile to profile, and trying to remember what was and was not there, in order to find out some of the most interesting aspects of our friends (for me, namely, their relationship statuses - completely and totally obscure now).

3b- The new highlights section has SOME group joins, and you can even hack the URL to filter by groups, but neither are nearly as sufficient as the old Home Feed. And of course, it's cramped, minimal in number, and absolutely not customizable, so I don't count it.

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