I wonder if I’m just becoming a crotchety old fogey who likes clean, uncluttered design. I have the same problem with the occasional photography clients (usually younger) when I design a clean album that tastefully uses white/negative space to help photos retain their individual impact rather than getting lost in a visual morass. It’s like if every last bit of visual real estate isn’t being used to hold some kind of informational content, it’s not being used effectively. An analogy would be writing a symphony in which every instrument plays continuously with no pauses from beginning to end, because any pause is interpreted as a wasted space where another note could go. Yipes.
We need a name for the point where a software products GUI finally gets all the bugs out and implements all more obvious useful features and looks relatively decent…and then the designers continue to release new versions with drastic changes that bring on new bugs and make the interface more of a mess and more difficult to change. Seems to be a common problem.
Maybe the “pre-Unity” point?
Excellent analogy!
Since this discussion is mostly about the Facebook layout and not really about privacy issues or things like that, I’m moving it to IMHO from Great Debates.
I think, my friend, that perhaps our neurons were wired differently than “kids these days”.
Honestly! I can’t process as many pieces of visual information at once as my kids. Watching us play video games, you’d think I was half blind. I’m looking at this zombie here and that one over there and the two shuffling down the hall, and my 19 year old is saying,“the chainsaw Mom, the chainsaw! Pick it up!” and I’m all, “What chainsaw?!” I honestly can’t see that many things at once.
The 7 year old-----whooo-boy! She’s scary, how much she can process at once. She even makes the 19 year old step back in awe. The very first time we fired up the Kinect for Xbox, she was flinging things around like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, navigating menus with her arms like she’d been doing this for years.
They’ve just been raised with more stuff to process at once. When I was a kid, there was one talking head on the newscast, right in the middle of the screen. By the time I was a teen, there were two “anchors”, but they’d still take turns talking. Now it’s four headed panels while the ticker is running along the bottom and two inserts are covering special news and there’s a promo for the network’s primetime drama running in the corner. My kid’s brains are wired to take all that in while they’re texting their friends and doing their homework. Mine…not so much.
Simplicio, it’s like the Peter Principle for electronics. You push the envelope and push and push and end up going one step beyond actual functionality. But to roll back to what actually worked would be to risk ruin, making it look like you didn’t know what you were doing when you implemented that last change.
The people who write this idiocy (and I see it all the time, even by posters on this board) are obviously new to the Internet. Facebook’s users are their customers, because if the customers get fed up, they’ll leave. But before that, the advertisers will leave, which will just hasten Facebook’s decline.
Don’t believe me? Ask your friend Tom, he’ll tell you all about it.
There’s a one-click option to change the privacy level of all your existing posts. Make them private or friends-only, then be more careful about what you publish in the future. I know this because I just made a facebook account (with a fake name, just for my WoW friends). I went through all the privacy options, and this was easy enough to do.
Is there a date when this Timeline switch is supposed to happen? My 16 year old came home from school and said hers had switched. I checked mine and it’s still the old setup.
A few of my “friends” have Timeline, I have the old set=up.
But, doesn’t it also make it just as much easier for you to go back and find the things you don’t want shared?
This seems like a good thing to me. If there’s information on Facebook you don’t want to be seen, you should delete it. Assuming that old posts are reasonably hidden because you have to click a link a bunch of times isn’t a good plan, both because (a) it’s trivially easy to automate the clicking of a button and (b) stalkers, the exact people that you’re most worried about accessing that old data, are the ones who are the most motivated to click that button and dig deep.
I’m reserving judgment on whether I like the Timeline visual design. Right now I think the “interleaved double column” thing is terrible, but I like the top part with the picture, and I like the logarithmic expansion of the past time.
Ok, can I bitch about this Timeline shit even though I don’t have FB? I got a notification on my Google Plus account about it! Some company posted to all users, I guess. I got annoyed and went out of my way to learn to block them forever. Don’t mess up my Plus with your FB!
I think the Timeline is fine; I guess I marginally prefer it to the previous design. I don’t find it to be too cluttered, but I can see how people would.
Maybe I’m unusual in this way, but I hardly ever visit people’s profile pages anyway. I view my news feed, and from there go to photo albums and events, or add comments to things.
The complaint about the Timelime making viewing personal stuff easier is an odd one. None of that stuff was difficult to access before.
This is not a new model. Commercial-supported radio and TV use the same business model. Advertisers are their customers, audience is their product. The one handing you money is *always *the customer.
My problem is that there is no easy way to change retroactively the privacy settings of past posts. It’s either “friends” or everybody. Well, I have different groups of people in my sphere. I would prefer to keep all of these people as friends and just drop people into groups like Google+ had, and then say “all posts prior to this date are visible only to: close friends”. But they will default it to all of your friends, and I don’t need my work people seeing everything I post, especially when grouping wasn’t an option until relatively recently. The only option they have is to go back and manually change the settings on 5 years worth of posts individually. Screw that mess, I’ll just dump everybody off my friends list that isn’t a close friend.
Seems to me that no matter who can see your stuff, the standard Internet rule applies: Don’t say anything online or in e-mail that you wouldn’t mind having posted on a billboard in front of your house (or shown to your boss, or your grandma). Just use your wetware and you’ll be fine.
Unless I’m remembering incorrectly, you can set all of your past posts to “private” with one click. It might be faster to do that first, then go back and make public the important stuff. If you do it the other way around, you’ll have to manually change permissions on almost every single post you’ve ever made.
Most people on facebook don’t care what happened to you earlier than yesterday, much less last year. So make everything private, then go back and make the highlights public (birthdays, deathdays, new job, whatever). Nobody will even notice the disappearance of your feelings regarding the cuteness of their dog.
I am not picking on you specifically, but it seems that someone trots this out in any discussion of Internet privacy. This may have been good advice ten years ago, but today, when we conduct all manner of transactions online, from dating to ebook checkouts to online banking, it verges on ridiculous to tell people that they shouldn’t say anything online that they wouldn’t want their grandmother to know. I met my husband online. There is literally no possible way that our relationship could have developed if I had limited myself to saying only things I was happy for my grandmother to hear.
Telling people “well, you just shouldn’t have posted information online if you didn’t want the entire world to read it” is sort of like telling people “you shouldn’t have written that letter if you didn’t want someone to intercept it, open it, and then publish it in the newspaper.” When you send a letter, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Similarly, you have an expectation of privacy when you send an email. And when a site informs you that certain information is private but then decides later on to change the policy and make that information more public than you’d originally been told, I think you have a legit beef with that site, and it’s not your fault just for posting stuff you didn’t want your grandma to know.
Sorry, this is a hobbyhorse of mine lately.
It’s a free site, so they can do what they want. You control what is on it; just go to the activity log and delete what you really don’t want or hide what you don’t want anyone to see but don’t want to delete. You can still make your posts as private as you want. I just go to my news feed 99% of the time; I don’t go to people’s timelines. In another year they will change to something else, and you will haveto adjust again. You can always change to Google+ if you really don’t like it.
And I just knew that someone would trot out this rebuttal. (Not picking on you specifically either. 
I like you!)
I just find it so odd that people posted stuff on their FB page last year, and now all of a sudden it’s not OK that it’s visible, just because now it’s easier to find.
I also don’t necessarily believe that people should take the “grandma” advice literally, but use a little common sense and discretion. I have a FB page, and my friends are about half fellow freelancers, half personal friends of varying degrees of closeness, and one client (who’s about to retire) with whom I’m quite chummy. I keep my tone on the professional side and watch my language. I post some political opinions, but I’m not a fanatic. I’d like to think that I could defend anything I say to anyone who would find it offensive (and also that I would not offend very often). Basically, I try not to be a jerk. (Sound familiar?)
I use “anonymous” forums such as this one for stuff that I don’t want generally spread around among my friends and colleagues. Not that I’m a raving crazy over here (I hope ) or that I have anything to hide. And yes, I know that some people here know my real info and could cause trouble for me if they were so inclined. That’s true for anyone. It’s just that FB is for stuff with my name on it, and here I can be Generic Internet Chick.
All the brouhaha over the Timeline reminds me a little bit about Chicken Little.
(Seems to me I saw an article yesterday about Google+ trotting out a new no-privacy policy, without an opt-out provision, that’s even more scary than Facebook’s. Ah yes, here it is. So much for “Just switch to Google+.”
You used to be able to do that, and now the only thing you can do is to manage all the past posts to “friends”. The only way to do that now is to change each individual post.