Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > August > 25 > Entry
Facebook frustration
One of the dangers of having too much success in the tech world is scaling it properly. What works well for hundreds or thousands of users may quickly break when millions of people discover a Web site and put it through its paces.
Facebook grew so quickly in such a short period of time after it opened its gates beyond college students that it was a miracle the site stayed up. Unlike MySpace, Friendster and Twitter, all sites that struggled with major outage periods as they went through their Web adolescence, Facebook held up remarkably well as traffic increased.
Sure, some of the Facebook apps like “Scrabulous” would regularly fail, the the Facebook site itself held steady. That’s a pretty big accomplishment when you have more than 100 million active users.
Unfortunately, Facebook is splitting at the seams elsewhere: in usability. While its polished, utilitarian surface seems fine, it’s increasingly common to see weird glitches on the site, seemingly arbitrary changes in the way information is presented and what feels like a lack of direction in how pages are displayed.
A large part of the blame can be laid on Facebook’s decision to introduce a “New Facebook” design. The company did a poor job telling its users what to expect with its new design direction; instead Facebook sprang it on its users a little at a time, so that for a period of several weeks, some users were automatically switched to the new design while many others were still seeing the old look.
This may have been wise from an engineering standpoint, but it left users confused — suddenly, profile layouts looks markedly different and apps that many of us had carefully chosen to install went missing from profiles. You could still find them, but it took a great deal of hunting and, in my experience, they can no longer be prominently be displayed on a profile without lots of work and frustration.
Perhaps in response to some “New Facebook” backlash, Facebook has made it easier to switch back to the old design, but this has only created a situation where some users have the new look while others are still rocking “Facebook Classic.” If you are someone who cares about what your profile looks like there’s no easy to way to determine what your friends will see when they come to your page without going back and forth between “New” and “Old” Facebook.
I’ve noticed recently that status updates and items posted to a profile now seem to change text size based on what app is posting it. You can manually change text sizes, but the hodgepodge of item and font sizes has made my profile look like something the serial killer sent out in the movie “Se7en.”
The last straw for me was when items I’d been posting to a Facebook Group for months were suddenly and unceremoniously truncated, eliminating a lot of work I’d done to share links with friends.
No explanation, no way to figure out what happened. Just another seemingly random change from Facebook that adversely affected the way I use the site.
I sent a message to Facebook’s help department, but vowed that I’d never devote that much energy to something being posted exclusively to Facebook ever again: why should I when Facebook’s blind redesign aesthetic could easily negate it, at any moment, without warning?
Why don’t I go somewhere else? Because a lot of close friends have migrated there from MySpace and other services and many of them aren’t likely to move to social networking sites I prefer like FriendFeed or Twitter.
They like having a place to post their photos, do some light blogging, comment on videos and e-mail or chat with friends. Facebook is good for all those reasons, but I’m growing weary of Facebook’s constant need to change things up without explanation. Facebook’s “Help” section is a joke and trying to track down the source of a problem always leads you down strange corridors of conflicting information, much of which hasn’t been updated since before Facebook’s big design switch.
I think Facebook has major infrastructure problems that have been hidden by the company’s ability to keep Facebook itself from experiencing lots of downtime. Time will tell if these frustrations will grow and spread to affect casual users of the site as well.
Edited to correct: Facebook just updated its stats to reflect that it now has 100 million active users.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Internet
Comments
Click here to report comment abuse.