Why I don’t like Facebook anymore

When it comes to social media/networking, I think things have whittled down to two major players: Twitter and Facebook.

There used to be more.  There still are alternatives out there, but I don’t use them for all sorts of reasons.

I was never a MySpace person.  The very first time I visited a MySpace page, it took a while for everything on the page to load and then someone was screaming at me.  I realized it was supposed to be music – they had this little widget type thing on their page that played their favorite song, which happened to be someone screaming like a Yoko into a mic.  This put me off immediately.  For me, MySpace was all down hill from there.

I discovered Facebook just moments before discovering Twitter.  I liked Facebook.  I had that wonderful rush we all get when we first sign up with it and people we haven’t spoken to in forever suddenly find and friend us and the catching up begins.  It was fantastic.  Then, I started messing with Twitter.

Twitter was easy, much easier than Facebook.  In my mind, Facebook and MySpace had far too much in common.  Facebook was, in short, becoming complicated.  My use of the site waned.  Now, if you want to know anything at all about me, my day, what I’m doing, etc and so on – you have to look to Twitter, not Facebook, to find it.

Then, Facebook changed.  They made a conscious effort to provide updates in a more Twitter fashion.  I gave them a second look and really liked it.  I could go to Facebook and see all my friends updates in a single stream – it was fan-freaking-tastic!  I found myself warming to Facebook again.  I installed the iPhone app.  I added the Facebook column to my Tweetdeck.  Thing swere moving right along.

Then, they changed Facebook again.  Now we have not one stream, but three that I’ve counted so far – there’s probably others that I haven’t figured out yet.  Status Updates, News Feed & Live Stream.

With ‘Status Updates’, I would see some information from my friends.  You can click the image to see what I see when I first login to Facebook.  Now, people have told me that I can do this and I can do that to make things different, but so far – it’s all been crap.

When I login to Facebook, I see this page and on this page is updates that are hours old.  All the time.  For weeks, I thought that people simply weren’t updating Facebook anymore due to the lack of info and updates on this page.

To make matters worse, when I would update my own status, I didn’t see it on the Status Update page/feed.  And people were telling me that they weren’t seeing my updates anymore either and I realized that I was missing out on their updates, which weren’t showing up for me.  What the hell was going on?!

Enter: News Feed.

So, okay.  I click on ‘News Feed’ and I start going through this timeline and I can see stuff showing up from Yesterday.  YESTERDAY?

WTF?

Okay – so, on Status Updates, I see stuff 3 hours old.  On News Feed I see stuff from yesterday that didn’t show up on Status Updates for whatever reason.  What’s the difference between News Feed and Status Update?  I have absolutely no idea whatsoever.  When I go to MY page to update my status, it doesn’t say, “Update Status or News Feed?” so how does it decide where your update is going to go?  And why is there nothing newer than 3 hours ago?  Is everyone asleep?!  And why is MY stuff not showing up anywhere?!

…wait, there’s another button now – on News Feed, it says, ‘View Live Feed’ and has a number next to it.  Okay, let’s click that.

…

Okay, so, the answer is that Facebook is just stupid.  When I click on ‘Live Feed’, I now see ‘live’ stuff.  Stuff from a couple minutes ago – my own stuff, stuff that’s not showing up anywhere else (apparently).

Again, no rhyme or reason that I can see or that makes any sense whatsoever.

With this revelation, Facebook once again becomes absolutely useless to me.

The point is to be able to see what people are doing, leave comments, interact.  If you can’t find what people are doing because Facebook has randomly hidden it inside one of three timelines there is no longer any point to even trying.  It’s a waste of my time.

So I return to Twitter, where there is only ONE timeline.  Sorry Facebook, but you suck again.

~P