The New Facebook Sucks

Wow, is the new Facebook home page the worst change ever, or what? I’ve only had it for about 15 minutes, so this is just a quick first impressions post, and I assume I haven’t noticed stuff that’s missing because I’m too in shock over the other stuff that’s missing.

Why bother taking away functionality and content from Facebook? If you want to change the homepage layout, that’s one thing. You can expect lots of complaints from people who are used to the old layout and resistant to change (which is going to be most people.) But why would you take away the ability to see various bits of information?

There’s no longer the “Live Feed” option that was automatically updating and let you see everything that was happening. I used to use that all the time. Now you have the “News Feed” which only shows you a tiny bit of what your friends are up to, without the option of seeing everything else. Sure, you can click every filter on the left-hand side to get some more of it, but Facebook is still only showing you a random selection of items each time (e.g., the News Feed is a random collection of status updates, not all of the recent ones.)

And then there’s some information that just isn’t available anywhere, like the Friend X is now friends with Person Y messages. I’ve lost count of how many old friends I’ve reconnected with on Facebook because of seeing messages like those. No more.

And birthday notifications? One of my friend’s birthdays was coming up this weekend, which I knew because I saw it listed on the old Facebook home page this afternoon. Now, with the new Facebook, it’s no longer mentioned.

And then all of the other random notifications from the live feed. So-and-so posted photos, or added some application, or joined a group. I can click through the filters and get some of that (photos and any group that’s made its way to the filter list) but other items (someone joining a group) is just off-limits now.

This is really mind-boggling. Facebook has been growing by ridiculous numbers because of all of the interesting things you can see about your friends, and all of the old friends that you can reconnect with. Why would they think it’s a good idea to limit how much information you can see, and limit the number of old friends you might notice on there? I don’t understand it at all.

And I hate it. It’s unbelievably stupid. I can’t find anyone who likes it. What in the world were they thinking?

All I can do is hope that they listen to the outrage — which they have lots of experience doing — and give us some of our old features back. They’ve gone back on things they’ve done numerous times in the past (Beacon and the privacy policy come to mind) so one more shouldn’t be a big deal. Though you have to wonder why they keep on making boneheaded mistakes like this. Is Facebook’s success just because of luck and being in the right place at the right time, rather than any good decisions by Mark Zuckerberg?

When Facebook first opened up to the public and I joined, I spread the word. I told people it was like Myspace, but done right. But then they pull crap like this, and who knows. If Google can get in the game with less stupidity and a more Open Networking-inspired architecture, I’d be all over that. The tricky part, of course, would be getting a critical mass of users. That’s Facebook’s biggest asset right now, the huge number of people on there. If they keep pissing everyone off with stupid changes like this one, though, that may be a thing of the past.

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Published:
3.13.09 / 7pm
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