I often wonder what those guys at Facebook go through when they think of their next design. The latest one is somewhat bothersome at times. I’ll admit that it is good at what it does which is connecting people but I think it does that too well. For example, I don’t need to know that John Jackson and Jack Johnson are now friends. In most cases I have no idea who other person is. It is however amusing when two friends of yours meet and become friends, independent of your influence and you find out via Facebook.
Now the issue I have detailed stems from the “News Feed”. Now I’m not sure what classes as news, but if Jane Smith sends a friend-wide message asking her friends to join her mob I don’t think 99% of those people who will see the message care if she needs help with her virtual mob. Facebook isn’t a game site. I think all those quizzes, games, surveys and any other abominations of the like should be terminated. I for one am proud of the fact I have never played Mafia Wars, Farmville or any other game with a similar principle. I believe Tetris Friends was the only game I played, until I was beaten by a good friend. A few rounds of Tetris never hurt anyone, in fact, Tetris probably does more for the mind than most games.
Another thing that annoys me is this new photo system Facebook decided to add. First of all, it requires a plugin, at least for Firefox. On the upside, I didn’t have to restart my browser, in this case, the slow beast known as Firefox. Of course this isn’t really a bother unless you are unfortunate enough to use public computers. Wrong move there Facebook team. After you have installed the uploader which is pretty good I guess, you have to pick out your photos. Obviously you would click “Upload photos” and go ahead and select your photos. Now you need to enter an album name. Well what if you have an album already created? Now you have to find that album, hit edit, hit add more and then do the same thing. The easier way would just be to add in an option to create a new album or select an old album to add to. Pretty simple isn’t it?
Now, here comes another load of ‘why would you think that is even a good thing’ from the Facebook team. I’m not sure if it is just me but there is a 10 pixel (approximate) buffer zone from the top edge of my browser to the button when it is highlighted. Such as small fix yet no one has decided to fix it. It seems like a trivial CSS touch up but I did some investigating with Firebug and they have made their top navigation pretty complex, most likely to deal with Internet eXploder 6. Nevertheless, looks terrible to me. However I’m not gonna write a Grease Monkey script to deal with it, I can live with such a minor annoyance.
Now I’ll conclude my Facebook rant/critique here, but don’t be alarmed, there is plenty more wrong with Facebook. At least they are a few hundred steps above MySpace (We can all agree here).
