Why is Facebook's timeline freaking people out?

[xnylder]

There's a thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=648411)in GD right now about how a person is so annoyed with Facebook's timeline feature that they're willing to deactivate their account. This isn't the first time I've read this: a few of my Facebook friends have also announced their intention to drop the social network over timeline. I simply don't get why users are so upset over yet another interface change. Certainly, timeline makes it moderately easier to see someone's life history... but only the aspects they've added to Facebook in the first place! It's also possible to remove items from your timeline, so if you don't want the world to know about that weekend in Vegas last year (for example), just delete any mention of it. Why are people suddenly acting like this is a deal-breaker?

PS I have asked people, but I've gotten only the vaguest "it's weird and I don't like it!" answers.

[Idle Thoughts]

No idea. Your guess is as good as mine. I love it. I think the cover photo alone is worth having it.
But what I've heard, from some of my friends on there, seems to be that it makes things hard to find and puts them in a very disorganized order. That seems to be the number one complaint I've heard. Another is that it "disappears" a lot of past posts, only showing the ones they think are the most important and making sure you never see some past posts and stuff again. I must admit that is a little annoying. I tried to look for something I posted about 3 months ago and couldn't find it. It just wasn't there. I finally figured that it was between two "months" (when it goes over to a new month on there, after scrolling backwards for a bit) and just wasn't displaying it for some reason.


But overall, I really like it.

[Typo Knig]

My beef is that I just get used the FB's interface du jour when FB management changes the interface for no discernible reason. Again and again. I wish FB would decide what it wants to be when it grows up, and stick with whatever it is. You don't see Google changing the fundamental structure of its interface every 12-18 months.

[engineer_comp_geek]

I personally like facebook because it allows me to keep up with old friends I haven't seen in a long time. Facebook seems to be doing everything in its power to make that more and more difficult to do. Timeline makes it much more difficult to look at someone's page and see what is going on.

I probably won't delete my account, but I have been doing less and less with facebook lately. It's almost useless for what I want out of it, so why bother.

[BigT]

Idle has it right. It gets rid of the linearity of the timeline and makes it nearly impossible to find the information that used to be front and center. For something called timeline from a guy who claims we're all about sharing more and more information, it sure does a lot of obscuring of that information.

I still have not let my page switch over to timeline. I don't know how much longer I can pull it off, but I intend to make them force the change on me.

I already don't use Facebook very much, though, so it isn't changing my habits. I just have one still because not having one would disconnect me completely from quite a few people.

[OldnCrinkly]

Well, I don't know if anyone is freaking out, but all the comments I see seem to unanimously agree that it sucks. People don't like the interface. It more seems to me like Facebook is freaking out about how they want the interface. If people don't like it, why force it? Its bad for business. I personally do not like it. In my opinion, it is not well organized. Your average Facebook page has too many different types of information to just hodge-podge them together and still expect a neat presentation. Who wants to spend time looking at a chaotic mess? At least when it was a linear presentation there was more of a separation between each element. Just my opinion.

[Green Cymbeline]

Idle has it right. It gets rid of the linearity of the timeline and makes it nearly impossible to find the information that used to be front and center. For something called timeline from a guy who claims we're all about sharing more and more information, it sure does a lot of obscuring of that information.+1 I agree with Big T and Idle. It randomly decides what is important and what isn't, and displays only certain things, and require an obscure click-through for people to see everything. So I go through my timeline, whole months are missing, important things are missing, and only accessible if you click on the months on the right-hand side (which most people are not going to do).

Another thing that happened to me recently, I posted a new photo album, and it just has never showed up on my timeline. It's just not there, unless you click through to my photo albums. But then other photos I uploaded via mobile showed up. I can't figure that one out.

[ZipperJJ]

Another thing that happened to me recently, I posted a new photo album, and it just has never showed up on my timeline. It's just not there, unless you click through to my photo albums. But then other photos I uploaded via mobile showed up. I can't figure that one out.

Yeah now you have to "share" your album once you're finished adding it.

I'm not up in arms about the timeline (not enough to leave or even to spend less time on FB) but it absolutely 100% has no value to me. There have been some annoying things that have come from me having to switch to timeline so pretty much Timeline is batting .000 for me.

The only person/group I know who likes the timeline is my brother who runs a band's page. And the band has been around since the 70s. So he has been having fun filling out their history. It makes me wonder if the timeline feature is supposed to be a draw for bands, groups, businesses etc to make them use Facebook as more of a main web site, come to rely on Facebook and then start charging for bands and brands to use Facebook.

The good thing is that the news feed stopped being messed with, and there's little reason for me to go to a person's page. So I rarely run in to the timeline.

I wouldn't be sad if it goes away and I hope it does.

I also think it loads like shit and whoever designed it must have the fastest graphics processors and Internet connections. Even on my powerful CPU (not GPU) machine, people's pages load like 1992 dialup.

[Tim R. Mortiss]

I kind of like the timeline concept. But even if I didn't, I wouldn't freak out. I'd just stop using Facebook and do my on-line interacting elsewhere. It's not like there aren't any alternatives. (*cough* Google+ *cough*)

[WhyNot]

My beef is that I just get used the FB's interface du jour when FB management changes the interface for no discernible reason. Again and again. I wish FB would decide what it wants to be when it grows up, and stick with whatever it is. You don't see Google changing the fundamental structure of its interface every 12-18 months.

If people don't like it, why force it? Its bad for business.

The thing I think people keep missing with respect to Facebook is that you're not their customer. I'm not their customer. We're their product, just as sure as if we were boxed up in a warehouse somewhere in east Iowa. We (or rather, our eyeballs and mouse clicks) are sold to advertisers. When we get used to an interface, we stop seeing the ads. That is, our brains just block them out as so much useless noise, and we stop intentionally AND accidentally clicking on ads.

They change the interface so often because it makes us see the ads again. (So why does Google not change so often? Because their focus is on using complicated algorithms to produce targeted ads - their hope is that you want to click on ads because you only see ads you want to see. While Facebook does do targeted ads, they don't do it as well as Google, so have to - or think they have to - rely on other methods.)

This is not meant to be a defense of Timeline, mind you. I hate it myself - I think it's just plain ugly and cluttered and I hate how most of the pictures are cut off on one or more edges. I much prefer text to pictures, and Timeline minimizes text and maximizes pictures, so that alone is a reason I don't like it. I feel like Timeline is a mistake in the long term because it alienates the viewer, and just because it's so MySpacey - people left MySpace because it got so hard to read, and then because so many people left, it wasn't useful any more. I'd hate to see the same happen to Facebook...and so would the advertisers.

[Sierra Indigo]

I also think it loads like shit and whoever designed it must have the fastest graphics processors and Internet connections. Even on my powerful CPU (not GPU) machine, people's pages load like 1992 dialup.

This, along with the difficulty in finding posts and information because Facebook uses some algorithm to determine what it things are "most important" posts, rather than just putting what you post up on your wall as you intended.

It feels much slower and clunkier than the old interface was. I haven't switched over, but I hate going to a friend's page when they've gone onto timeline because it is so slow and just really annoying to read and navigate.

I'm not about to kick my heels and scream and throw a tantrum, but neither am I going to voluntarily change to what I feel is a less useful setup. They can change it on me.

[Mr. Accident]

I don't like it because it looks like myspace and facebook got together and had an ugly baby. The only thing from the timeline layout that I like is the cover photo. Everything else would be put back to how it was if I had a choice in the matter.

[Acsenray]

I have no idea how to find anything on timeline and I don't want to have to spend time learning it.

[Justin_Bailey]

The thing I think people keep missing with respect to Facebook is that you're not their customer. I'm not their customer. We're their product, just as sure as if we were boxed up in a warehouse somewhere in east Iowa.

People keep saying this, but it isn't true, and I doubt it ever was. Facebook survives by being able to talk about how many users they have. Driving those users away is bad for business. End of story.

But besides that, Facebook also sells something called Facebook Credits. If they want people to buy them, pissing them off as they use Facebook is not the way to go.

[Hazle Weatherfield]

Big T: How are you "not letting" your page switch over? I've never known anyone that ever had this choice. We all got switched automatically. How are you pulling this off?

[xnylder]

I agree the arbitrariness is frustrating, in both the allocation of stories on the timeline and the interface changes. I'm still not completely sure how articles are chosen to display on the timeline and in what order. I thought it was purely chronological but now that I look carefully, it seems that items from both the person and their friends are being arranged... somehow. I can also see that some people are frustrated with the interface change because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I have to admit that's never bothered me much, but then again I guess I'm a tinkerer. But even I wish Facebook would offer a better guide to how to control what is displayed on your timeline. Thanks for your input!

[Typo Knig]

Big T: How are you "not letting" your page switch over? I've never known anyone that ever had this choice. We all got switched automatically. How are you pulling this off?

Some people volunteered for the change to timeline. The rest of us get flipped off to timeline on FB's schedule. I haven't been turned yet, but resistance is futile.

[Acsenray]

I can also see that some people are frustrated with the interface change because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I have to admit that's never bothered me much, but then again I guess I'm a tinkerer.

Even a tinkerer is only a tinkerer to the extent that he or she has decided to dedicate time and effort to tinkering with something. What if every time you got in your car, all the controls were re-arranged? What if every time you sat down at your computer, the keyboard was re-arranged? What if your light switches randomly changed from "up is on" to "down is on"? All based on someone else's whim of the day?

We all live busy lives, we can't afford to dedicate time to tinker with every damn thing. It used to be that every time I got a new version of Mac OS or MS Word, I would spent a couple of days exploring every single option, customization, and preference, to set things up just the way I wanted them. Well, now I don't have the time or the interest to do that. So being forced to spend time learning new configurations, when I have already allocated my time and effort to other things, pisses me off.

[Rushgeekgirl]

I hate the big banner photo because on my little monitor it takes up over half the space so I have to immediately scroll down. I don't care than half the page is taken up by another person's recent activities, apps and their friends list, their "likes" and then their recently added friends. Once you get past all that the columns of their status updates can often be shown out of order.

I don't have it yet and I've tried to avoid any apps because I heard that's how people are getting switched. It's been making it hard to read some people's links, but usually I can just do a search on Google for most news links.

[Eve]

"We just found out Eve is thinking of finally going on Facebook, so we have decided to make it even more confusing."

[Zsofia]

I just don't get how other people are evidently using Facebook so differently - I almost never see people's actual pages, so I rarely see a timeline at all. I just read what's on my news feed.

[Banquet Bear]

...I switched over to timeline as soon as it became available: and in New Zealand (timeline was tested here first because our country is good like that) we've had timeline for months and there were hardly any complaints. IMHO its much nicer to look at and work with and makes a better facebook experience overall. Not much to complain about down here.

[Swords to Plowshares]

Timeline is hideous and looks like a bad Myspace page.

[PapSett]

I do love the cover photo, but the rest of the timeline, I preferred the old FB style. It was much easier to find things-on Timeline, stuff jumps around if one thing is deleted. Just a pain in the ass.

[heathen earthling]

I don't have the timeline yet, but when they force it I intend to make an anti-timeline banner as the cover picture, at least initially. Do they have people who go through all the cover pictures to censor stuff like that? For all the complaining about timeline I've seen, I've never seen anyone make an anti-timeline timeline.

[AClockworkMelon]

Another is that it "disappears" a lot of past posts, only showing the ones they think are the most important and making sure you never see some past posts and stuff again.This is my only issue with it and, to me, it's a big one.

[guizot]

Timeline is hideous and looks like a bad Myspace page.That's probably the main reason, though most people don't realize it.

The timeline design just screams pure, unapologetic narcissism. It's like six-year olds pretending they're rock stars.

[Inner Stickler]

You can use this to pretty much get rid of timeline for yourself. (http://socialfixer.com/)

[WhyNot]

People keep saying this, but it isn't true, and I doubt it ever was. Facebook survives by being able to talk about how many users they have. Driving those users away is bad for business. End of story.


Of course it's true. And that's what you're saying, too. If they run out of product - users - it's bad for their business with advertisers. Same thing as if a literal gold mine dries up, or a crop is devastated by the frost before harvest.

I've been using Facebook for....oh, hell, I don't know, and Timeline makes me too dizzy to go look. Years, anyhow. And I've never given them a cent. Not a penny. So how am I a customer in any meaningful way?

[AqualungBats5th]

People freak out when things change. Some people freak out even at the mention of things possibly changing. This board's history is overflowing with examples. Search for "avatars" or a certain unpleasant word that starts with a "C".

[Inner Stickler]

I've been using Facebook for....oh, hell, I don't know, and Timeline makes me too dizzy to go look. Years, anyhow. And I've never given them a cent. Not a penny. So how am I a customer in any meaningful way?Ads. Every time you see that frumpy redhead from YOUR HOMETOWN with a secret way to lose weight, Facebook gets a little bit of money. Most people think ads only pay out for clickthroughs where the viewer actually clicks on the ad but nowadays a lot of advertisers use CPM or Cost Per 1000 Impressions. Any time the ad is shown, the advertiser pays up.

[Justin_Bailey]

Ads. Every time you see that frumpy redhead from YOUR HOMETOWN with a secret way to lose weight, Facebook gets a little bit of money. Most people think ads only pay out for clickthroughs where the viewer actually clicks on the ad but nowadays a lot of advertisers use CPM or Cost Per 1000 Impressions. Any time the ad is shown, the advertiser pays up.

Exactly. Users aren't the product being sold, they're a company asset being sold to advertisers. The product is Facebook's almost unmatched matching software that pairs ads with your likes/profile.

[engineer_comp_geek]

I just don't get how other people are evidently using Facebook so differently - I almost never see people's actual pages, so I rarely see a timeline at all. I just read what's on my news feed.

You are missing a LOT of updates from your friends. Facebook quite some time ago stopped putting everything on your news feed. Now it only puts what it thinks is important there. And with timeline, if you go to their pages to see what you missed, you are going to have a very hard time finding it.

If all you care about are the most popular updates from only your most popular friends, then keep using it the way you are. If you actually care about all of your friends, well, too bad. Facebook has made it about impossible to see what's new with all of your friends.

[WhyNot]

Ads. Every time you see that frumpy redhead from YOUR HOMETOWN with a secret way to lose weight, Facebook gets a little bit of money. Most people think ads only pay out for clickthroughs where the viewer actually clicks on the ad but nowadays a lot of advertisers use CPM or Cost Per 1000 Impressions. Any time the ad is shown, the advertiser pays up.

YES! Right! Exactly! Facebook gets a little bit of money from the advertisers. The advertisers are their customers. Facebook is selling my eyeballs to advertisers.

[Inner Stickler]

But if facebook pisses you off by making the advertisers their top priority, you leave and go elsewhere and facebook loses revenue. People are not products in the way clothes or electronics are because we always have the option to walk away. Facebook needs to keep you happy or it won't get any advertisers.

[Justin_Bailey]

But if facebook pisses you off by making the advertisers their top priority, you leave and go elsewhere and facebook loses revenue. People are not products in the way clothes or electronics are because we always have the option to walk away. Facebook needs to keep you happy or it won't get any advertisers.

I get it and you OBVIOUSLY get it. That might be the best we can do.

[Kolga]

I don't have the timeline yet, but when they force it I intend to make an anti-timeline banner as the cover picture, at least initially.

I, too, haven't been switched over yet, and when I am, I am totally going to do this.

I don't like it because it's clunky. It's unwieldy. It makes it more difficult to find the updates and posts in chronological order. It hides information based on some algorithm that decides for me what it thinks I should want to read. It takes longer to find a specific piece of information for which I am looking.

There wasn't any need for FB to fuck with the presentation and interface, so I don't know why they felt the need to create something that's so ridiculously unhelpful.

[Steophan]

You are missing a LOT of updates from your friends. Facebook quite some time ago stopped putting everything on your news feed. Now it only puts what it thinks is important there. And with timeline, if you go to their pages to see what you missed, you are going to have a very hard time finding it.

If all you care about are the most popular updates from only your most popular friends, then keep using it the way you are. If you actually care about all of your friends, well, too bad. Facebook has made it about impossible to see what's new with all of your friends.

You can set, for each friend, how many updates you want to receive, and of what type. I'm not 100% certain that you can actually see everything, but I've never noticed that I've missed anything when I've set it to "all updates".

[Inner Stickler]

I know way back in like 2011, facebook secretly moved everyone to seeing just their most interacted with friends updates but you could change your feed to show updates from all friends. I know I made that switch but when I looked just now, I couldn't find where that was so I don't know if that setting still exists or if FB took it away for good. There are definitely people who, for whatever reason I don't want to unfriend but my life is happier when I don't see their every post.

[Lamia]

YES! Right! Exactly! Facebook gets a little bit of money from the advertisers. The advertisers are their customers. Facebook is selling my eyeballs to advertisers.

But if facebook pisses you off by making the advertisers their top priority, you leave and go elsewhere and facebook loses revenue. People are not products in the way clothes or electronics are because we always have the option to walk away. Facebook needs to keep you happy or it won't get any advertisers.This does not contradict WhyNot's point, which is that Facebook users are not the people who are actually giving Facebook money.

This isn't an idea unique to her either; I remember one of the texts assigned in a Com Studies class I took in college made exactly this point about broadcast television and radio in the US. (This was a year or two before Facebook was invented.) There was a particular quote that made an impression on me, and while I couldn't swear to the exact words now it was something like "The viewer is not the customer, the viewer is the product. The advertiser is the customer." This was part of a broader point about how mass media isn't necessarily just "giving the people what they want", because what "the people" want may not be what makes the advertisers happy and the advertisers are the ones who are directly paying for the content. A TV network obviously needs viewers to attract advertisers, just as Facebook needs users, but decisions that annoy viewers/users are not always bad for business.

If timeline becomes so unpopular that it causes people to leave Facebook in droves then that would lead to Facebook losing advertising dollars, but if users grumble about how much they hate timeline but continue to log on, or if some users leave but the remaining users click on more ads, then Facebook will be making as much or more from advertisers as it did before.

[Inner Stickler]

This does not contradict WhyNot's point, which is that Facebook users are not the people who are actually giving Facebook money.Some users no, but others are. Haven't you heard of Facebook Credits?

[Justin_Bailey]

This does not contradict WhyNot's point, which is that Facebook users are not the people who are actually giving Facebook money.

Again, Facebook makes a non-trivial amount of money from users by selling Facebook Credits directly to them. So yes, many users do give Facebook money.

Second, if you've ever looked at any of Facebook's advertising minisite, you would see that the company lists the users as an asset that they use to sell advertisers on the wonders of Facebook.

[pulykamell]

Timeline is hideous and looks like a bad Myspace page.

It's not quite that bad (yet), but this is part of the reason. It's ugly and unintuitive (at least to me.) I left MySpace for Facebook early on because using MySpace felt like a return to mid-90s web "design." Ugly, cluttered, too personalized. Yuck. Facebook offered me a clean, neat interface that, at least at the time, seemed pretty easy to navigate and intuit. I didn't have to dig too far to find out the info I needed.

Since the four years that I made that switch, Facebook has continually screwed with the interface and pretty much everything that I liked about it. I cannot think of a single change they've made to improve the interface I had when I originally joined it.

Timeline is a huge eyesore for me. The two column format drives me batty. I hate having to follow that center line to find the arrows (or watch where the boxes end) to figure out whether the stuff on the left or right is the next in chronological order. I'm still not quite sure what items get displayed in the non-Timeline box that appears on the timeline itself. (Items like Friends, Likes, Recent Posts By Others.) One person's page has one set of items there. Another person's page has another set of items. And all the graphics that clutter up the page. Ugh! It's just visual and informational cacophony.

I sometimes wonder if it's just a generational thing. I'm not exactly that old (36), but I have noticed that the generation younger than me seems to be able to deal with and even want just more stuff crammed into their visual space. Like video games that have way too much freaking information on the state of everything in the game and your player on your screen at one time. I just want the game, my score, and how many lives I have god dammit! (Yeah, I know, the last two are not necessarily relavent concepts in most video games anymore.)

[WhyNot]

But if facebook pisses you off by making the advertisers their top priority, you leave and go elsewhere and facebook loses revenue. People are not products in the way clothes or electronics are because we always have the option to walk away. Facebook needs to keep you happy or it won't get any advertisers. And I understand that, but so far they've been correct in their estimates of how far they can push us. Everyone who posts "Timeline sucks! That's it, no more Facebook for me!" on their Facebook just makes me facepalm. Not a single one of my complaining Friends has actually left. They keep posting. Many of them keep posting to complain about Timeline. And as long as they're there, Facebook wins, because they're looking at ads while they post how much they hate Facebook.

It's exactly like the farmer who has to judge how late he can keep his crop in the field without risking losing it to frost. If he judges wrong and pushes too far, then he's hosed. But if he can push it and push it just a little further, the crop yield maximizes and he can sell more at market.

Just don't kid yourself that you're Facebook's market. You're the produce. You're the, in Facebook's own term, "asset." Facebook couldn't care less if you hate Timeline with the fire of 100 suns, as long as you are still using it.

When they eventually judge wrongly and piss people off enough that they actually leave in droves, then yes, they've screwed the pooch. Then they'll start losing their actual customers, the advertisers.

Really, I think we're only arguing semantics. We agree Facebook can't go too far and cause users to leave or they'll lose advertising dollars. My only quibble is that many users call themselves Facebook customers, and I don't agree with that use of the term.

On Preview: Oh, hai, Lamia! And, no, I've never heard of Facebook Credits. What does one do with them?

[Lamia]

Some users no, but others are. Haven't you heard of Facebook Credits?No, I haven't, or I've forgotten about it if I have -- and I've been using Facebook for about seven years. What percentage of their income is from sales of Facebook credits?

Second, if you've ever looked at any of Facebook's advertising minisite, you would see that the company lists the users as an asset that they use to sell advertisers on the wonders of Facebook.I can tell from context that you feel this contradicts WhyNot's point, but it looks like you are saying exactly the same thing she did -- Facebook makes money by selling access to their users to advertisers.

[Inner Stickler]

You're not paying for this board either, do you feel that the board considers you a product?

[AClockworkMelon]

You're not paying for this board either, do you feel that the board considers you a product?I know I feel like a cheap whore. But then, unlike the unwashed masses, I'm a sponsored member. So I've got a different pimp.

[Lamia]

You're not paying for this board either, do you feel that the board considers you a product?What do you mean by "the board"? While I don't think the average SDMB user or Mod/Admin feels that way, I'm sure the people who run Creative Loafing Media do. They don't allow me to post here for free just to be nice.

[Justin_Bailey]

No, I haven't, or I've forgotten about it if I have -- and I've been using Facebook for about seven years. What percentage of their income is from sales of Facebook credits?

We won't know until the go public later this year.

I can tell from context that you feel this contradicts WhyNot's point, but it looks like you are saying exactly the same thing she did -- Facebook makes money by selling access to their users to advertisers.

But that doesn't make the users the "product." That line of thinking is just freshman year philosophy that's just one step above using the word "sheeple" in all seriousness.

[Lamia]

But that doesn't make the users the "product." That line of thinking is just freshman year philosophy that's just one step above using the word "sheeple" in all seriousness.Okay, so you actually agree with WhyNot's point, you just don't like the way she worded it. Glad I could clear that up for everyone.

[Rushgeekgirl]

Social fixer only fixes so much. It doesn't take away Timeline, it just reorganizes it. Plus at least on my computers it drags too much. And the one thing I thought I'd like is faulty. The notification when someone "unfriends" you. It works sometimes, but it's more annoying than useful when the friends you lost over a month ago randomly pop up on the list. It's almost always just people deactivating their account anyway.

And yes that big hideous photo banner reminds me of Myspace. I have noticed too that most of the people I know personally enough to discuss such things who do like the timeline are generally much younger, like my daughter's age (22).

[control-z]

I think it's the filtering and the complexity with all the boxes everywhere. I think people just want newest at the top, older posts pushed down. Nothing ignored unless specifically requested.

[Colophon]

I don't have the timeline yet, but when they force it I intend to make an anti-timeline banner as the cover picture, at least initially. Do they have people who go through all the cover pictures to censor stuff like that? For all the complaining about timeline I've seen, I've never seen anyone make an anti-timeline timeline.
Woo yeah! You really know how to stick it to The Man!

[Larry Mudd]

My only complaint with the timeline layout is that I made up a nice combo cover & profile pic, and last week the layout changed slightly, so they don't match up anymore. What the..?

Apart from that, I like the timeline much better than the old layout. A huge improvement.

[Christopher Robin Davies]

People keep saying this, but it isn't true, and I doubt it ever was. Facebook survives by being able to talk about how many users they have. Driving those users away is bad for business. End of story.

But besides that, Facebook also sells something called Facebook Credits. If they want people to buy them, pissing them off as they use Facebook is not the way to go.

Of course it is true. If we were Facebook's customers we would be paying them money for the use of their service. We do not. Instead, advertisers pay Facebook to put adsin front of us. Facebook's users are the product being sold to their advertisers.

[LionelHutz405]

You don't see Google changing the fundamental structure of its interface every 12-18 months.

Google Plus was launched less than a year ago and has already had a major interface overhaul.

[TruCelt]

I know only two people who freaked, and both because "old" things they thought were gone showed up again, and were on the page for days before they realized it. Old comments and photos, that sort of thing.

For me, I'm just sick of the changes, period. I understand that Facbook gets boatloads of free publicity every time they make a change, but it's annoying as heck.

[Asimovian]

I rarely encounter the Timeline because, as others have said, I'm generally just reading my News Feed. What I don't understand, though, is what advantage Facebook gains by not allowing me to have the "Sort by Most Recent" option on the News Feed be the default. Why does Facebook want to force me to see things in some random-ass order?

[guizot]

Why does Facebook want to force me to see things in some random-ass order?It's not as random-ass as it may seem. They design it so that information will come to your attention in a way that will draw you in to being a more active user. Everything Facebook does is socially engineered to get you to log in and use Facebook more.