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Ready to join Facebook? Excellent. The first step is to add everybody that you’ve ever met by importing your contacts from your email and adding everybody as friends. Just make sure that you add these individuals to pre-selected friend lists. That way you can configure all your privacy settings as necessary. Don’t know how to configure your Facebook privacy settings?
No problem! Just view our 10 Facebook privacy settings that we wrote about previously. That should at least get you started. Now you are just steps away from having a perfect Facebook configuration. That’s right: you aren’t done yet! My guess is that you didn’t just join Facebook though. You’ve probably been on the site for a year if not longer.
That means you already have around 100 - 200 friends at least and you probably haven’t properly configured your friends lists, although you’ve started trying to. Pull a lever, push a button, and try to make a few other changes. Suddenly you realize that this isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Managing your social connections suddenly become overwhelming and all you really wanted to do in the first place was spy on your ex.
Things were so much easier and innocent when Facebook was limited to colleges but years later we have interconnected relationships and things just aren’t that simple. Globalization was also a good idea until the whole collapse of the financial system took place and now we’re realizing that globalization is not so smooth sailing either. Maybe that analogy is a bit extreme though. You can’t boil the whole financial system down into one sentence, right?
Earlier today I read an article by Julia Angwin which echoes many of my sentiments:
I feel overwhelmed. When I log into Facebook, I’m barraged by a stream of updates that are dominated by those friends who are on Facebook all the time – or at least at the same time I am. I often scroll down to the bottom of the page, vainly searching for the kind of items that used to catch my attention before.
The catchy stream that Twitter provides has now become integrated into Facebook. On Twitter, I basically stopped using the service non-stop because after following one thousand people, there was no way I could possibly monitor everything taking place among my “friends”. Facebook is rapidly generating a similar sentiment although I’m more inclined to use the service for obvious reasons.
Power to the People?
The key question is whether or not it makes sense to give people full control of their information flow or if social platforms should automatically filter the stories on behalf of the user. It appears that there are two types of users and each has their own personal preference. The heavy users of social platforms are more inclined to control every aspect of their information.
For example a few users told me that they had invested a fair amount of time perfecting what users they receive stories about when suddenly Facebook pulled the rug out from under them and switched the design. Now users are back to filtering feed stories but in a different way. Whether or not this change was good idea is hard to tell. Ultimately Facebook is best suited to determine which model is most effective because they have the usage data.
In a world of content overload, my gut instinct is that automatic filters are the most valuable feature of social platforms but in the last redesign Facebook essentially threw that out the window.
Conclusion
Right now, Facebook has become a platform for us to communicate with one another but the rules of engagement are no longer clear and managing our relationships have become increasingly complex. With the amount of time currently required to configure a Facebook account, it becomes more of a philosophical question as to whether or not it is worth the time investment to configure your Facebook account.
Do you find it to be increasingly challenging to manage? Is this a concern that only I have or have you found it increasingly overwhelming?
Well, it is simple. With the last update Facebook assumed all its users were wanting a Twitter-like experience. Sandberg’s presentation also shows that the new page follows their business model better. However I have a large proportion of friends who have stopped using the service and are frustrated - I think there may be permanent damage to the trust in the service.
This is a radical turn of Facebook policy. MySpace took over from Friendster, when Friendster restricted its users and MySpace even allowed HTML hacks. Facebook was next due to its flexible platform and elegant toolsets.
With these Facebook always modeled its usage after what its users want and what its users were, an active close community engaged internationally. FB at that time looked at growth and not after the business model. The growth got too fast, they radically had to shift to focus on a business model.
So the redesign is a short-term method to get the crown from Twitter, to up their valuation and to create new revenue streams.
But it seems they failed. People use the service less and if they want unlimited noise, they just use Twitter instead. Most of Facebook’s homepage is taken over by feeds from twitter apps from addicted and noisy twitter friends and endless variations of quizzes, which you have to manually hide every day. The smaller users, the mums who update once a week with a few pictures from the weekend, the party photos, tags and invites get drowned out.
Facebook’s growth is still big, but its new users may just be the viral effect from a few months ago lagging behind the reality. I still have friends joining now that I invited them in December. They post proud ‘hey finally I am here’ messages and I sadly tell them that they are too late.
Anyway, it seems Facebook left many of its users behind and changed its philosophy. It may be irreparable - it has now been a month and even if they reverse their change, many will not trust the service to not do the same thing again.
I just wish that there was a pre configured friends list that showed all of your friends that are in no lists. That way no one falls threw the cracks.
Also, it is not clear to me if I have a friend that I do social things with, say we’re in a hiking group together, who I also work with. If he is in Hiking Group and also in Work, which rights does he get?
Totally Agree!
I think the current system would work great if the “highlight” feed wasn’t a worthless piece of trash. The highlight feed is supposed to offer the automatic filtering of the old news feed, but the story selection fails miserably, and the story formatting makes it too difficult to parse through.
And for power users, the new filtering setup is way better, though it does take a legitimate effort to setup. But once you have a good friend list, you can set it to the default filter (drag it to the top) and the news feed becomes very relevant again.
I don’t think it’s a big deal — I already had a VIP group set up before the change. I have a glance at the main feed, then switch to the VIP group to look at my “real” friends’ items more closely. That’s pretty much the same for me as it was before.
Agreed. Every now and then I think, alright… time to get serious again about Facebook. But it always seems like so much of so little.
This also doesn’t address what many of us consider the real loss in the resdesign–no more relationship updates and friends’ new friends. (And even moving most newly posted photos and group joinings to the useless Highlights section.) It’s just all noise and quizzes now. Fine if you’re in high school, but if you’re older than that, it’s just lost all of its fun. I posted here a while back that I feared FB was just going to try to run out the clock on all the complaints about the new design, and clearly I was right. Baah. I use it about 1/3 as much as I used to. (and I’m someone who has done all the right things in terms of setting up filters and whatnot–but there’s no way I can set up the option to *see* stuff they took away!)
First of all, amen to Jane Doe above, every word.
Facebook before latest redesign: I enjoyed getting in touch with old friends, enjoyed hearing from them as well as what they were “becoming fans of” (even if it was an unusual kind of food or whatever), enjoyed hearing who my friends were befriending (even if I didn’t know them, but naturally curious in case I did), didn’t mind hearing what applications/quizzes etc. they were using, because it was only a single line.
It basically felt like a town square in which I could see what my friends were up to. The page I was looking at reflected that. I could scroll down a page or two and know what my friends on Facebook were up to. And they (and I) would be relatively active.
Facebook after latest redesign: my list of friends is as it was, and I haven’t sought out any new friends since the redesign. I no longer find out who they befriend or what they are a fan of; this is part of the new design - it is designed to be less social, amazingly enough, given Facebook proclamations.
Instead of the feeling of the town square, it’s more like reading a magazine that has even less content and more ads than a real magazine - and the ads aren’t even fun or attractive to look at…
The things I am a fan of now take up a LOT of space (a third of a screen, on average - on a 24″ screen, with a reduced font size) - the same goes for pointless quizzes. Sure, Opensocial or whatever they’re called make a lot of money off those “Which WHATEVER are you?” quizzes, and perhaps that helps the FB statistics in the short run… but in the long run, I’m extremely turned off by this turn of events. While I sometimes found these items mildly amusing as one-line items in the old FB (and would perhaps occasionally look at the quiz itself), in the new FB I automatically HIDE the entire application (and that’s after the revision of the redesign - before that I even had to block some users for (unwittingly) spewing entire pages of whatever daisies they gave to whomever). Before the redesign, I didn’t mind it so much when it was just a single-line item on a screen full of info about my friends.
Having said that, all the talk about FB being jealous of Twitter made me curious about Twitter, so as a direct result of the redesign, I joined Twitter as well. And for whatever it is that FB is trying to do right now, I prefer Twitter…
… and since Facebook is no longer Facebook, but for the most part an inferior copy of Twitter mixed with spam, I spend less time on Facebook and am waiting for the Next Thing. It’s only the residue of an address book that keeps FB mildly attractive.
I would suggest an Open Source solution to anyone who wants to take it on: the Facebook API makes it possible AFAIK to obtain information such as who befriended who, who wrote on whose wall, who became a fan of what. (My iPhone app is still mostly like this, albeit somewhat garbled, it seems, as some apps switch over to the new design.)
So why not create an app that allows you to configure your own Facebook page? I don’t have the skills to make this come about, but this could be a great task for a FB designer. Present a few themes and allow FB users to finetune their social networking experiences. And once that works, it may be possible to integrate other social networks (a la FriendFeed), but in a customizable experience.
Facebook lost the plot with the redesign. Facebook had the lead when it came to a place where you could connect to friends. It’s better for staying in touch with friends and, perhaps, making some new ones. Twitter is fun for reaching out to people you don’t know and feeling the mild titillation of “hearing” celebrities do/say things in real time, but it doesn’t have the same feeling of staying in touch with friends as FB does. Or rather, DID.
P.S. - I can’t for the life of me understand why FB got rid of such basics as “X and Y are now friends” or “X became a fan of Y”.
EPIC FAIL.
Quote:
“Armin Prediger’s” post above.
Nailed it.
Further, I have no idea what my reach is on Facebook anymore. Whos blocked my content because I spew news all the time. I use the feed for what it’s been redesigned for, which is frankly useless to me without statistics.
Facebook has become chore at best, a Time Vampire at worst.
I use it less, everyone I know uses it less.
Yes, I agree with you–it’s become impossible for me to manage my news feed. Like you, I have over 1000 friends, many of whom I only want to read sporadic posts from. I also have no interest in reading about friends who are using some app that I want no part of. The re-design apparently gives me no way to address these concerns.
Well, to tell you the truth I haven’t logged in to my FB profile since the new layout has been launched. Every once in a while I check the Mobile version and that’s it. As I said back then, if I wanted to join Twitter…but I joined FB (1 year ago) and the FB I liked is gone…and so do I
No, I won’t waste 2 hours trying to figure out how to rearrange again the whole thing, I’ve just done it 6 months ago with the old-new/new-old version so that’s impossible, really. Then, who knows, maybe tomorrow they’ll decide to redesign it again!
I actually think they’ve done us a favour ’cause we spend less time (if we spend at all..)on FB.
I am still on daily, and quite a few times a day . . . but I absolutely agree that the magic is gone for me. I definitely feel like I am less “in touch” with the people I used to be in touch with. I thought the first redesign (a year ago, maybe?) had a lot of people up in arms for no reason, but this time, I have to admit that I REALLY do not like it.
and yet . . . I’m still here. hmmm.
One of my daughters and some good friends have been blocked through the facebook news feed but people that I chose to block keep appearing. Why is this?? Shouldn’t it be my choice as to who appears on my page and in my feeds?