Facebook – What’s Not to Like?

Facebook – What’s Not to Like?

Like many others, for years I have this love/hate relationship with Facebook. It’s great to catch up with friends, share photos, stories and such, but some days don’t you just want to close your account and drop out of the whole Facebook scene? Things not to like about Facebook:

“Private” Messages? Yeah Right…

The new timeline look of Facebook was an option at first, but now is the only way to view your profile. I get that. but to take messages privately exchanged between me and one other person and suddenly make them available on my timeline for all to see? That’s just wrong. (Read more about the issue here) Thankfully, I would never post anything online that I didn’t want anyone to see, but many friends have trusted Facebook to keep some info private and are taking issue with having to keep one step ahead of the constantly changing “privacy” settings. Lesson learned. Facebook can and will do whatever the heck they want with your info in the back end, private or no.

To Like or Not to Like, That is The Question

“Whether tis nobler in the mind…” When someone posts something you get two options: Like or Don’t like. This is awkward at best – surely we are not so shallow that every post is relegated to just two options. For example, someone posts about a negative life event. Clearly you don’t like it. So you have to comment. I wish there were other options besides like that didn’t involve comments. Sometimes I just don’t know what to say, but I want the person to know I read it and am thinking about them. What about Emoticons buttons? A little help here Facebook…

Navigating Through a Billion Losers

I don’t know about you, but I stopped looking at the newsfeed years ago because It’s full of commercials and automated posts from someone’s latest online gaming binge. Who wants to wade through all the crap to find relevant posts from people you care about? The “groups” feature helps a bit with this, but eventually, as people begin to figure out how to segment their “friends” into various groups, Facebook will have to start peppering those groups with ads too, because no one will be looking at the newsfeed anymore and there go the ad revenues. Then the groups will have the same polluted look as the newsfeed does. There has to be a better way to give the people what they want and please advertisers too.

Downloading Facebook Mobile – Approximately 3 Years Remaining

For a long time, I tried to use Facebook mobile on my iPhone and I would get the animated “loading” icon for a few minutes and finally an error would pop up saying that “Facebook couldn’t be loaded at this time.” I finally was able to load it a few months ago, but the feature set is pitifully limited compared to the desktop version. Often photos fail to load, and so I reload them, and then they appear twice. Or I upload a pic, everything appears to go ok, my friends see it, but it doesn’t appear on my wall. Facebook mobile is cloogy at best. Perhaps they haven’t heard that more than half the world uses smartphones or that more people own mobile phones than own toothbrushes.

Free? It Aint Free

I am always surprised by customers who talk about Facebook being free. Do they really think Facebook just wrote this gargantuan app out of the goodness of their hearts? Make no mistake, there is a cost to using Facebook: your information. They use it to market to you, they use it to provide marketing research data to other companies. Worst of all, they have our consent (per the licensing agreement none of us read when we started our accounts) to use our info any way they want.

I will continue to use Facebook, like most of you will, because they have something we want. We will put up with the crap, because we don’t want to miss out on the friendships and sharing we all crave, but it doesn’t mean we have to “Like” it. By the way, I haven’t anything bad to say about Google+. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend you try it out. I really like the way it works, simple and elegant. Way to go Google!

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