Internet Stuuffs

Stupid Changes to Facebook

EDIT: A majority of these complaints were addressed when the icons were relocated to the toolbar on the bottom of the page (where the chat is).

If you’re a facebooker you may have noticed the changes they rolled out almost unexpectedly a few days ago. The changes are a new profile page, new home page and new look for business pages. But there seems to be some big problems, at least with my profile, that rolled in with the changes and I find these issues just stupid.

1. Advertising / Pages - With the old homepage (which lasted about 6-8 months) a business person could access their pages and advertising information from facebook quickly and easily. There was a list of all kinds of applications on the right hand side that you could move around or click ‘more’ to reveal more stuff. It was in this list that there was a link to the advertising and pages area of Facebook. With the new changes I am completely lost as to how to access my advertising information or how to create a new page. There is no icon in my home area at all and going to http://www.facebook.com/pages/ doesnt give me the option of making a new page.

2.  Status Updates - It used to be that your status updates were their own thing, then facebook changed it last year to mingle in with your friends wall post and now it seems that status updates are more important to your profile page than anything else. In fact I changed my status yesterday and today looked at my profile to see my ‘recent’ activity buried under two days of status changes. This is also making it really hard to read through profile information on the ‘wall’ since it’s not even close to being in chronological order.

3. Notes, Events, Groups etc.. - This sort of piggy backs on my first complaint. Quick links to all of this was once located on your home page so you could create an event or note or group, edit information etc.. But now it is no where to be seen. I wanted to write a note the other day and literally couldn’t find the stupid link so I had to just guess at the URL and luckily enough I had it in my recent history.

4. Developer - As a facebook developer I once had quick access to my applications and the developer community on my home page. Now there isn’t even a mention of this.

5. Ad Disguising - You think the beacon was bad? Facebook now has a strip of crap on the right side of your constantly updated stream called ‘highlights’. The highlight post are formated to look very very very similar to the ads facebook post on the right side as well, the only major difference being the thumbs up and thumbs down icons below the ad and the air horn icon to the right side of it.

6. Filters - Facebook has replaced all of the home page for users with a constantly updated stream of information and has provided a list of stuff to the left of this stream called ‘filters’. Here you can select a predefined filter (predefined by facebook not you) of information you want to view from your friends. There are only 8 filters to choose from. 5 are standard filters (photos, links, events, videos, notes) and 3 seem to change constantly so are most likely from application developers purchasing or persuading use of that spot (currently 2009 bracket challenge, twitter and name generators are my three).

Oddly enough when you click on the Photo, Video or Link filters facebook allows you to add your own content, but in the Notes and Events filters there is no such option. The only events I’ve been invited to of late were created before the change, which leads me to think there is a lot of confusion on how to create an event.

From what I can see Facebook has made it easier to add more personal stuff and to track your friends movements but harder to actually update your own information or control the many parts of the website you may have been fond of. When redesigning the new home page and user page feeds facebook completely left out large parts of the website without a single thought. Facebook also seems to have made it harder to discern content from advertisements, something most internet ad networks banned a long time ago, by integrating the look and feel of the advertisements into content streams in what could be an attempt to trick people into clicks to increase facebook revenue.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has made changes and cut off areas of the website. Do you remember the marketplace? How about the phone book? Both were taken from the homepage in a minor update last year and the marketplace seems to have vanished, however, if you search for “phonebook” it will show you results with this above them “Are you looking for Phonebook?” if you click on the word ‘Phonebook’ it will show you a list of all your friends phone numbers that have entered them into facebook.

If you are having issues with finding stuff on the new facebook here are a couple things I’ve found to help out.

These links are not located anywhere on the home page of facebook and could be hard to find:
To write a note: http://www.facebook.com/notes.php
To create/join/edit a group: http://www.facebook.com/groups.php
To create/edit an event: http://www.facebook.com/events.php

To create a business page or buy facebook advertisement the link is no longer on the right hand side with an icon, it is now only located at the bottom of the website in the footer under ‘Advertising’.
http://www.facebook.com/page.php#/advertising/?src=pf

Developer Access:
I was not able to find any substitute for the quick links to a developers applications like there once was.

if you have any facebook issues to share, feedback or questions on the above feel free to share in the comments.