There’s a threadin 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.