Come on Facebook, what the hell are you up to?

Social networking site Facebook has become fairly ingrained in some peoples’ lives. Finding old flames, keeping in touch with coworkers, it’s facilitated social networking becoming “acceptable” to all ages from schoolmates all the way up to the ‘silver surfers’. Our local park-care society in Wakefield is on it, my family use it, most bands I photograph use it, we’ve organised parties and gigs with it, and finally the company seemed to have sorted its advertising stream and professed to being cashflow-positive (a rare thing right now).

Except it’s completely shagged. Over the past few weeks Facebook’s over-engineered interface suffered from glitches and annoyances: internal database errors and ‘endpoint faults’ (brought on by AJAX calls failing) are the norm. Bizarre artefacts are strewn around such as missing comments or missing messages, and frequently your account is ‘temporarily unavailable’. Old stories and feed items are resurrected like peeling zombies in a Hammer film and the poor end-user is left thinking ‘what the heck…?’. The issues affect every platform including the mobile phone version, ‘Facebook Lite’ variant and the API. Bugger.

Of course there are growing pains with any web service (goodness knows we had our fair share of them at Fotopic.net) but with a workforce of 900+ employees which founder Mark Zuckerberg claims to command surely there are resources to ensure it stops online? Or is this part of the ‘agile development’ cult? Rumour has it any Facebook employee can push code to production within an hour. Go go QA.

Alright, you’re going to say “We’ll give you a full refund!” If you’ve not paid anything for Facebook that’s fine, and that covers most of the userbase. However the micro-advertising and targeted-advertising means it’s not all clear cut: I have in the past tried Facebook advertising, it’s worked for me and made us some dosh. I wouldn’t try it now though: the problems, lost data, strange occurrences all contribute to absence of confidence in the product. After all, how do I know whether those click-throughs are real?

Zuckerberg’s obsession with micro-blogging site Twitter has led to a rash of copycat attempts to duplicate that site’s functionality within Facebook. Whether you agree with that approach or not, it’s pretty much obvious that the reliability of the site is suffering as a result. When reliability suffers people walk (FB’s been comparatively quiet over the past week). When people walk, the social aspect suffers and advertising revenue falls: view the downfall of MySpace, Faceparty, Orkut…

So, I’ve been going through my Facebook ‘friends’ and jotting down any contact details which fall outside the remit of Facebook. I’d suggest you do the same: it’s taken a long time to link up with some of these people and if Zuckerberg succeeds in killing the goose it’ll be everyone who gets hit by the fallout.

…just a thought, like.

This is a side-note: If you’re reading this on Facebook then you’re getting a syndicated version – the original version is always at blog.joel.co.uk. Quite a lot of people read this via RSS as well.

What does this mean? Well, there will be comments made by Facebook friends on the syndicated ‘notes’, and there will be other comments left on the blog itself. It may also mean that any edits to articles (to correct spelling mistakes, slight factual errors such as dates and so forth) may not make it onto those sites.

I’m not saying the way you read my blog is ‘wrong’, just be aware you may miss content such as the lovely person who left such a nice comment about the trip to see U2, or odds and ends of tech info.

From Valleywag:

Facebook is unveiling a redesign which replaces its friend-tracking News Feed feature with the Stream. The biggest difference: Corporate Facebook pages, for which users sign up to be “fans,” can now place stories in the Stream much more frequently than they did with the News Feed.
[snip]
The result: Facebook profiles will show less of what your real friends are doing, and more of what corporate pals like Starbucks and Ben & Jerry’s are up to.

I first noticed it this morning when rock band U2 appeared in my friend feed. The full article is here and talks about “lifestreaming”.

On the redesign (coming hot on the heels of the last one not 6 months ago): I can’t see the more militant Facebook users liking it but you get what you pay for. Me, I still can’t bring myself to resign from Facebook although the first step is admitting you’re an addict…

I noticed last night that Facebook have introduced a box which details ‘Other People You May Know’. While it’s found me a couple of people I’d not been in touch with for a while, it’s also recommended me people I generally don’t really like or know.

This in itself isn’t bad – Facebook has no way of seeing in my head and working out previous relationships unless I tell it about them – but it also recommends people I’m actively blocking or have removed from my friends list (for whatever reason). To add to this, it doesn’t seem to ‘remember’ when I remove them from that list either with the result that I have ex-girlfriends, former acquaintances and people I don’t know at all appearing on most page refreshes with no way of getting rid. How distracting.

I wonder if it works the other way and recommends me to people I’ve de-friended or blocked?

Update: Given a few acerbic remarks elsewhere, I’d say that’s a ‘yes’! However, looks like it’s been fixed now so at least it remembers your settings and history of ‘no thanks’. Other comments seen have led me to believe this isn’t a welcome feature addition either. Bless ‘em.

If you’ve not heard of Facebook you must have been living in a cave detached from the Internet. Its popularity has been documented in all forms of media – both positively and negatively – as being ‘the’ online social network lauded for its ease of use, and lambasted for its cavalier approach to data protection. I’m a Facebook user and since many of my pals are online I’ve built up quite a large list of ‘friends’ – links to other people. Recently I discovered some issues which I’ll document here.

The first trouble with Facebook is in this ‘friends’ system. I link to a lot of people covering the whole gamut from vague acquaintances to lifelong heartfelt friends, from someone I once had a brief fling with in the early 90s, to professional contacts. That’s a hell of a wide spread, and presents the problem that I can’t ‘socialise’ on Facebook using phrases I’d keep from my professional life without broadcasting it to the professional contacts. The solution to this I suspect is adoption of a graded friends system (another social application called Orkut tried this and it seemed to come close) or maybe a ‘friend-group’ system, but however you rearrange it it presents a second problem.

Enter the inglorious world of playground politics! Over on Facebook, we’re all in the playground. Example: Why is Dave friends with Susan and not with me? Does Dave not like me? Dave said he hated Susan, but he wrote ‘Joel’s such a twat!’ on her wall – does he mean me? Is there another Joel? Do I punch him in the teeth when we next go to the pub together? While it’s better to rise above this, Facebook’s organisation engenders such paranoid behaviour and the more friends appear, the more you live online, the more it’s a problem; age and experience seems to be little barrier – people who really should know better turn into I’m-not-your-pal-today 10 year-olds at the drop of a hat. Words spoken in anger get logged, time becomes no healer, crap gets dragged up from ages ago.

The final issue – say you want to leave Facebook. Cancelling your account is apparently a lot easier now (ironically you’ll need a Facebook account to read that) but what about keeping in contact with the people you do want to stay in touch with? There is no mechanism for backing up Facebook data, presumably by design – once you’re in, you’re in. In researching this I found Robert Scoble got suspended for hoovering his own data, but I’ve been doing it manually through a Firefox plugin called Facebook Scavenger, however it still needs to be manually triggered. I did investigate backups using the Facebook API but it doesn’t expose phone numbers or email addresses any more, even at ‘maximum authorisation’ level.

As an aside from this there’s quite a bit of talk of Facebook Fatigue, and I’ve certainly noticed that friend responses/updates are much less frequent than they were 3 months ago. The next big thing is apparently Twitter, but from what I’ve seen of it it’s just bloody annoying.