Geeked: Facebook will rule the world
Seems like pretty much everyone was honked off at Facebook this week. And I would be among them.
For most of you guys, the reason probably had to do with the complete overhaul that Facebook stuffed down our throats on Wednesday; I was irritated about that as well, but the bigger problem for me was that this column was done Wednesday night, and then founder Mark Zuckerberg announced even more sweeping changes at a developers' conference on Thursday, and I had to start all over.
Really, Mark? Really?
The Zuckster had a busy week, and we all noticed on Wednesday, when we opened FB for the first time and saw a ticker! A revamped news feed! Stuff out of chronological order! Chaos!
OK, maybe it wasn't that bad, although you might have thought so judging from the reaction. Let's take a quick look at the new stuff:
Tick, tick, tick
You'll find the ticker in the upper right corner of the home screen. It's a constantly updating scroll of what your friends are doing and saying, and you can mouse over a particular update and comment or follow whatever links show up. It has been suggested that this new feature is a little Twitter-esque, but it moves a lot faster than Twitter does. My personal FB account has about 600 friends and pages, and at that number, it's a little hard to keep up with. If your friend list is in the thousands, that thing is going to spin like a slot machine -- and it's going to be pretty much useless.
Feeding time
The new news feed is FB's somewhat creepy way of showing you what updates it thinks you want to see, based on interest you've shown in the past. If you interact a bunch with a few people, you're going to see more of them in the top stories list. If you visit more often, you'll start seeing chronological updates, but they're still going to be filtered by the eyes of Our Facebook Overlords. You can help with the training by clicking on or off a small blue triangle that appears to the left of each update, and FB will undoubtedly remember what choices you make.
Ready, set, go
We've talked about this before, but Wednesday's update showed all the manifestations of the influence that Google + has had on Facebook. FB's new lists? They're organized like G+ circles. And they give you the ability to post to specific lists, or even specific people, depending on your whims. You also now have greater control over the specific stuff you see from others; FB gave you the keys to cut out photos, info changes or -- my favorite part -- game updates. Something to be aware of: The default setting is that you see most, but not all, updates from your friends; if you want to change that to seeing everything, you have to do that with each and every friend.
A tip
If you're one of the bazillion people who's bummed out about not seeing a straightforward chronological update list since the update, you can fix that with some simple tinkering. Create your own list -- you do that in the sidebar on the left side of the home page -- and add everyone to that list. That's kind of a tedious thing because you have to add everyone individually, unless you have previous lists that you can merge with the new one, but once you've built it, displaying your new list will show something that looks an awful lot like old Facebook. Feel better now?
And then there's the global domination thing
And just when we'd had about a day to digest the physical changes to FB, the Zuckenator took to the stage at the f8 developers' conference and told us that he envisions a Facebook that isn't so much a site we visit as a thing that's a part of every facet of our online lives.
Zuckerberg announced a new series of partners -- Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, Yahoo! and the Washington Post, among others -- and said those services will be woven into FB to make it a destination for nearly anything we might want to do online. He also said more changes are coming to FB's look and feel, the most intriguing of which will be called Timeline, a new way of organizing and displaying posts all the way back to when we signed up.
This is all designed to change how we use FB, but it's also a shot at Google, which hasn't had success in the social space until recently. Facebook has mostly reacted since Google started G+ in the summer; this is FB's shot at moving ahead again.
But here's the thing. FB not only needs this to work, but it needs to make sure it's implemented well, which hasn't been a strong suit. I like many of the changes FB made this week, but springing it all on users at once makes it a tough change to swallow; I found the automatic changes to default settings to be especially irritating. And FB hasn't had a solid track record recently with other new features. Does anyone remember Places? Did anyone use Facebook Messages or Deals? The answer is, uh, no -- no one did, and that's why they were all killed within months of being unveiled.
If Facebook is smart about how these work and how they're rolled out, they could be nice enhancements and actually make FB an enjoyable place to visit. But if they do things as they always have, there's one thing to remember: Google+ just opened enrollment to the public this week, and it's looking awfully nice over there.
