Well, here we are in March, and Facebook has found another way to anger its userbase. Granted, they are an unpaid userbase, but they are angry. As I mentioned earlier, Zuckerberg’s creation is great for catching up with lost friends and sharing pictures of your kids, but it’s not so great for making money for its founder. Zuckerberg’s group just had a nasty PR hit when it tried to subtly change its privacy policies, and it took another one when it basically decided to let scam artists pay to advertise on the site and prey on its members.
Now Facebook has radically reengineered its front page to turn it into … Twitter. You know, *tweet*, *tweet*. Twitter basically exists for the most narcisstic in our society who feel the world is consumed with the minutia of their day. You know, “Carl is making a peanut butter sandwich and is getting ready to watch 24.” That kind of urgent communications.
Facebook always had a status update portion, but it was the least interesting part of its site. Rather, when you logged on to FB, you would only see the last three status updates, along with the newest posted photos from your friends, links to cool old-school videos on YouTube, and links to thought-provoking articles. Basically, if you had interesting friends then you were blessed with interesting content, free of charge.
But Facebook couldn’t stop there. Twitter had lately stolen much of FB’s media attention, so a change had to be made. Those of us who logged on to the site on Friday found out that all of the dynamic, interesting content was gone. In it’s place was … line after line of status updates. A laundry list that basically let you know how boring your friends are. Yes, the other content is there, somewhere, but it’s buried on others’ individual sites and now very difficult to find. Basically it’s no longer worth the trouble.
I clicked on the feedback link and sent FB a simple message saying: “You guys suck! Way to ruin a good thing!” I received an auto-generated message saying, “Thanks for your feedback! To see how others think, go to our blog discussing the topic at http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=59195087130!” I was glad that I had the chance to do this, as this is where the fun began.
I have been checking the comments to the change at random times. I have not read one single positive comment. Not one. But how many? Well, the site is set up to automatically delete your comment when it reaches the number of 101. There are only 100 comments displayed at any one time. No one is reading any of this feedback, definitely not Zuckerberg.
I have to think that at this point tens of thousands of users have registered their objections to the new layout, with a 99.9 percent disapproval level. It’s mind-boggling. Further angering all of us is that when you post an opinion, it vanishes into the ether in minutes, as 99 other angry FB users needed to say the same thing.
I am deleting my Facebook account.
Filed under: New media
