Farcebook

| ploafmaster
I made my inglorious return to Facebook several weeks ago because I got tired of calling up my mom to tell her stuff only to find she already knew because of her friend status with various people I know. So I’m back in the loop, at least for now. I still see the same thing as I did over a year ago – people friend each other, and once you’ve made your digital connections there’s little else to do but post status messages and use their mountains of useless apps.

But now it’s just a bigger and more tangled mess, and no more so than on the default view when you log in: the News Feed.

I feel that there’s very little rhyme or reason to this view. Here you have a jumble of status updates, comments, fan-mentions, sponsor surveys, app notices, friend notices, et cetera. Is it chronological? At first it may appear that way, but over the course of any given day I begin to notice certain items jumbling, disappearing, reappearing, moving further up or down the list, and who knows what else. It’s fairly often that I see something posted early in the week suddenly appear underneath a status message posted two hours ago even though there are more recent items below.

There. I’ve released a little bit of steam over this still-almost-entirely-a-waste-of-my-time website. Yeah yeah yeah, I’m still on Facebook. Maybe in another year I’ll look at it the way I look at my cell phone – just another “necessary” communication tool. But for now it feels like using cough syrup; you feel like it could be helpful, but it’s disgusting all the way down.

3 thoughts on “Farcebook”

  1. Twitter is just status updates. How is that better? And that’s not a rhetorical question. What makes you like Twitter better?

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  2. @Mugs: Twitter’s core functionality is short broadcast messages, but it’s usefulness to me is really the gestalt of who I’m following and what they say. I know that sort of thing differs from user to user, but for me as a user, I’ve found entertainment, advice, quick answers, etc. from Twitter in the form of links, off-hand comments, and direct messages.I know you could have the exact same stuff on Facebook if you fine-tuned what you saw in the news feed, but people I know don’t seem to use it that way.A fair number of tech blogs/news outlets/etc. have referred to Twitter as “microblogging” – I kinda hate that term, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. I follow a lot of the folks whose blogs I read regularly, and I feel like it’s often supplementary to their blog content.The folks I’m friends with on Facebook mostly just post 1 or 2 status updates a day and otherwise pass apps and notes back and forth at each other like FW: emails.Your mileage, I’m sure, may vary.

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