Friday, September 23, 2011

Upgrade, downgrade

I am aware that is all very "you damn kids, get off my lawn" but I have to say something. Why must there be constant "upgrades" to things like Facebook?

Facebook seems to have an almost pathological need to "upgrade" every few months or so. They change lay-out or notifications or list management or any sort  of nonsense that just seems to mess things up and almost always affects your privacy settings. "We have now listed your friends by middle initial! And we made it all public! If you would like to have your privacy back, please troll through these twenty menus and click a bunch of boxes!"

The funny thing about this post is that I started writing this a few days ago, before the big roll-out of the "new" Facebook. Now that there are even more changes, I suppose you can guess how thrilled I am. I probably will get used to them or figure out a way around them. But this doesn't mean I have to like the change. The new changes make me feel old and stupid. This is not what I want from something that is supposed to be a sort of entertainment.

Do you know about the subscribe button? They've started something with "subscribing" to people's updates. These are people I've already declared to be my friends, and now I have to subscribe to them? (Now it's quite possible that I don't fully understand the subscribe function, but isn't that another issue? Facebook shouldn't be hard to do.) If you don't subscribe to "all" updates, Facebook will decide what the "important" stories are (they have an algorithm!) Of course, what happened to me was that I missed the announcement of a friend's engagement (apparently, not important), although I did see that he went to the high school football game that week (Facebook says: important!)

I know I'm complaining about something that's free. I know that most of us will shake our fists and do nothing but complain about it for a few days. And that's what Zuckerberg is betting on. Maybe he's right, but what he's forgetting about is the group of people who will shift away, spend a little less time on Facebook, then realize they don't really miss it. They'll find some other way to stay in touch. They probably won't take the time to delete their account (I have an old MySpace account kicking around but that doesn't mean I use it.) Technically, they're still "on" Facebook, so Zuck can still claim his gazillion "users."

I'm sure I'll stay on Facebook. I'll be checking in, maybe doing the occasional status update or uploading some pictures. But I also know I'm going to be working a bit harder to figure out Google+.

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