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.
…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.
Timeline is hideous and looks like a bad Myspace page.
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.
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.
This is my only issue with it and, to me, it’s a big one.
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.
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?
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”.
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.
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.
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.
I get it and you OBVIOUSLY get it. That might be the best we can do.
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.
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”.
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.
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.