After something close to a two-month delay (I believe the original announcement heralded the upgrade at the beginning of June), the “new Facebook” has finally arrived, and it . . . sucks. At least, that’s the general consensus among people I’ve talked to, and I agree with them. It’s clunky, mesy, unintuitive, and just generally leaves you feeling mistreated and uncomfortable. (I’m going to set aside all the privacy concerns of Facebook and such, because this is a post for people who use Facebook.) However, as one who was intrigued by the original announcement, I decided to give the “new Facebook” a further look, and I realized that it’s not as bad as it first appears. Most of the issues are superficial, a matter of flow and convenience, which is immensely important in a website whose success is based on easy use, but at least the underlying structure and ideas seem to be sound.
With that in mind, here’s a few things that desperately need to be changed in order for the “new Facebook” to actually be seen as an improvement by some people (as well as a few tips for those trying to use “new Facebook”, which really needs a better name, as well, though at least it’s not *shudder* Facebook 2.0):
- Make the Wall default to “Posts by [person]” and not “All”. At least for now, it’s very confusing seeing (formerly) news feed posts by one person and wall posts by either people intermingled. It’s an interesting (and somewhat slimy) acceptance on the treatment of wall posts not as two-way communications but as public commentary that is routinely “Facebook-stalked” by others, but as of yet even for people who compulsively read others’ walls it’s too disconcerting and confusing (especially when some people don’t even realize there are options to filter them).
- There’s no longer any easy way to put your status back into the edit box in order to fix typos and the like. Trivial, but annoying and (more importantly) done better by the old Facebook. Most of “new Facebook” seems either different or worse, not better, and if they’re going for something that’s not an obvious upgrade then you’d damn well better make sure it’s not any worse.
- Similarly trivial but annoying, allow me to collapse or remove the “Friends” box from the main profile section. You can remove your “Basic Informaton” box (or at least remove all the information from it) but the only options for the “Friends” box are to change the number of friends displayed–starting with 6. I know it’s a social networking site, but fuck you, Facebook. (Granted, the option to choose which friends are displayed somewhat makes up for this, allowing for a pseudo-official “Top Friends” function; but it’s still worse than old Facebook.)
- This probably has a negligible impact on the Facebook population as a whole, but it appears that Facebook has dropped support for the basic RSS news feed import plug-in, which is annoying as hell for me because I use it to import these blog posts. What’s more, it just stopped working around last night, and there’s been no message or explanation for it. [ETA: Apparently it isn't an issue of dropped support so much that Facebook's RSS importer sucks.]
- Allow people to reorder the boxes on the Info tab. A person’s Facebook page is all about versatility, being able to put things where you want them, and taking that away from people is bad. Once again, old Facebook does this better. Even if separating those boxes onto their own tab is a good idea.
- Thankfully one of my biggest initial concerns–the lack of place for application boxes–has been fixed by the rapid addition of a “Boxes” tab for you to put all those applications you have lying around but don’t want displayed on every fucking page of your “new Facebook”, but that’s more or less a stop-gap measure. The ability to add a tab to display an application’s full page is next to useless; the applications that use a full page display allow users to easily get there from the application box, and those that don’t won’t ever need it.
- What really needs to be done, in my opinion, and what I understood was promised from the initial tab design notes, is the ability to make your own blank tabs that function similar to the “Boxes” tab but with even more freedom. I want to be able to make a tab, name it, and put whatever boxes I want to on it in whatever format I want to on it. Allow boxes to be collapsed, or, to be really generous, also allow them to be resized to any dimensions you want. (That’s difficult to do, I understand, but it’s fucking Facebook. If anybody has enough money to develop that kind of architecture, it’s them.) You may end up with a visual nightmare, sure, and sure, Facebook’s edge-up on mySpace and the like has always been that it’s not hideously ugly, but as long as the Facebook visual style is maintained even the most wack-job Facebook page will still look better than the average mySpace one, and users will love the versatility. (Haven’t you heard, Facebook? Web 2.0 is all about choice, right?)
