Here is this week’s ‘Guide to Facebook’ cartoon: part of a series that so far contains two drawings, two months apart.
Facebook, for the uninitiated, is a free social networking service. Users flocked to it as it became apparent just how good it was at connecting friends, how easy it was to share photos, how well presented the interface was compared to such awful rivals as MySpace, and how unintrusively and neatly advertising was inserted without detracting from the experience.
Then the creators of Facebook made a big mistake. They decided that the site shouldn’t just stay the same for ten years, but should actually improve. First they introduced the News Feed, which caused a storm of protest because it brought together already-shared content in a convenient way, which of course was a silly idea. Next came the ability to post photos as well as just text, and then the “Like” button, which everybody still hates to this day, the “Comment” feature, which frankly no one uses, and a move up to a wider layout. Why on earth they bothered to expand from the old 640-pixel width is beyond me, since most people today still use tiny goldfish-bowl-shaped monitors anyway. And then they had the gall to put photos of users on those users’ own profile pages. Each of these changes created entire protest movements with almost as much passion as the opposition to the Iraq war.
Latest in this flurry of outrageous improvements, of course, is the News Feed, where you now have more control than ever over what you want to see and what you don’t, where Facebook now learns from the user over time what they consider important, and where at last you can actually share different levels of things with different types of friend.
Stupid, isn’t it? Even more ridiculous is the way Facebook had the cheek to actually pop up little boxes explaining each change, with the reasoning behind it and help to use it, the first time the user encountered it. Disgusting.
Bring back the Facebook of 2004. We all liked it back then. If they are not careful, I will take my hard-earned cash elsewhere. Oh, wait.
Ah, nostalgia. It’s not what it used to be.
hahaha…sooo funny – and so true!