Happy Birthday Facebook!!!

A rude awakening

As with any other day, I start my morning via logging on to (in no particular order) facebook, yahoomail, cnn.com, time.com, soccernet.com and malaysiakini.com to get my morning news and updates.

It now a routine, and I have been doing this (facebook excluded) for the past 6 years or more. So yeah, if I don't do it, my day just started on the backfoot and you better not step on my tail today or you shall be facing a very agitated Ben ;)

And today was one of those day you wouldn't want to meet me. OH YES.... one of the above website is guilty of vioalating the sanctity of my morning ritual and no other than FACEBOOK!!!

WHAT THE HECK???

As I am currently in a different time zone ( -8 hours compared to Malaysia) I would usually log onto my account and then click the "Older Posts" button on the bottom left of the page. This is to catch up with the comings and goings in the life of family and friends at home and of course to post some comments on these photo/status/relationship updates.

However, that wasn't the case for today!

I clicked and clicked but the message "No more updates to be displayed" and the last update on show was last updated 4 hours ago which means all updates from the time I went to bed to 4 hours ago mysteriously went missing!

Logging off didn't help, nor did clearing my cookies and by this point I was quite irritated by this. I decided to proceed with viewing the other websites and it was at cnn.com which I finally found out why. Read all about it here.

So what has changed???

1. Instead of having your request tab on the top right corner, it is now on the top left corner, right under the facebook logo. A smart move from the point of a marketer, but in their defence (facebook has been under heavy criticism for being over marketing their user info in the past) I am glad that I no longer see the adverts being displayed quite prominently on my page.

2. All your apps are now also on the top left side of the page instead of the bottom left, which makes sense but again it has drawn certain criticism of trying to hawk it's games and apps. Again, in facebook's defence, you are using the service for free, so bear with whatever they try to sell to you to make more advertising revenue. If you are not interested, just remove these apps, or block it from appearing on your notification. Unless you are willing to pay, stop whinning! :P

3. The privacy and account setting is now prominently displayed on the top right hand side instead of previously hidden. Makes not much of a difference to me, but with the privacy hoo-ha nowadays, it's a pretty CYA step from facebook.

4. The observant ones might notice there is no No. 4 in the accompanying photo :) However there is another change which was not mentioned, the requirement of a "Photo plug-in" to upload photos. This however would not be discussed here and will be in my next thread tomorrow :)

Conclusion

I am not affected at all at the cosmetic improvements of facebook, but more for the delays and interuptions it causes whenever one of these 'upgrades' take place. I have yet to hear about it on facebook, but from experience, when I used to upgrade my MSN, the cotact list disappears! Even then, I just go to my hotmail address book and recover everything and I am still a loyal MSN (now Window Live) user and until that happens to facebook (which I do not have a contacts backup!) I am more than willing to put up with the niggles and glitch once in a while.

And oh ya, Happy Birthday FACEBOOK!

Regards,

Ben Lai