Facebook Sucks, Again

Do you remember the last time Facebook sucked? Facebook tends to suck every now and then, with the spikes coming whenever they change something. Well, anything really.

I got invited to the Facebook launch party tonight. It all started with an email from Blake Ross which you don’t really get every day. We got a tour of the campus and they dropped us off at the cafeteria for food, drinks, and talking to buddies. There were strange moments where you would look out the cafeteria doors and see the fluorescent office lights or look at your watch and realize it was still before 8pm. But overall, it was really fun. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from Facebook.

So, the idea of the night was still a launch party. They had monitors with a countdown that eventually hit 0. Mark Zuckerberg had a little spiel about the origins of Facebook, launching products, and so on. Random side note, he is not that tall, but he has about 40000 messages in his inbox and over 400 friend requests. He went on to introduce 6 new products. Let’s see if I remember them:

1. HipHop for php
2. New photo uploader
3. New homepage
4. Application dashboard
5. Games dashboard
6. New search functionality

It’s awesome how self-aware Facebook is. During their first big launch, when news feeds first came out, they did not expect the negative feedback that they received. It seems that by now, it’s something they completely expect and welcome. To this point, they set up live feeds of news containing the string “new facebook”. Right when all the products were pushed live, they projected these feeds on the walls and TV screens.

“Fuck the new facebook. I’m so confused. @#!@#%& giggity”.

It’s amazing how much people hate change. I mean really, how confusing can it really be? Have you ever walked to class only to find that the sidewalk your on is closed because they are repaving it? Sure things move around a bit and I’m sure the first time you get ready to click on a button you thought was top-left only to find it top-right it’s jarring, but is that something you’d really say confuses you?

Or maybe it’s confusion about why to even change the homepage. A lot of the results that showed up were along the lines of “why fix what isn’t broken?” I’m sure they said that last time Facebook changed, only to eventually accept that it actually is better now. Sure it may not be broken, but that’s no reason to stop trying to make things better. Much like life.

Also, who says “giggity” when they’re confused?

“I hate the new facebook. stop changing my life”

Like I said in my last post, Facebook still comes out winning. First of all, tons of companies would kill for any sort of feedback from their users. They would kill for their users to respond within 15 seconds of them pushing a change. What’s better though, is that all these pissed off people want to tell all their friends. Here’s how:

1. Change your status on Facebook.
2. Facebook News Feed picks it up and delivers this to your friends’ homepages.
3. Your friend notices the Facebook homepage has changed. He decides it also sucks and decides to go to step 1.

It’s great for Facebook that all of this occurs without anyone leaving the site. Sure, there’s lonely people out there that have ditched Facebook altogether because they changed their homepage again. I’m sure they are living less confusing lives now because of it. Maybe this time around, people will realize that complaining about the new Facebook homepage is actually more annoying than the new Facebook homepage.

It totally sounds like I work at Facebook.