Yanno, when I trade my privacy for something, I kind of expect it to be worth while. But it seems like Facebook just excels at not fixing niggly little annoying issues.
To wit:
1. Facebook search sucks.
Recently, I wanted to post this story about National Novel Writing Month to my Facebook, and I wanted to tag a bunch of my friends who were NaNoing this year. But I can’t just type in “nanowrimo” to the search box, can I?
Sure, I’ll get the official NaNoWriMo page, and a few fan pages. But what I really want is a list of all my friends who have mentioned NaNoWriMo in their statuses, perhaps in their hobbies or “likes”.
This would be handy more often than you realize. How many times have you struggled to remember that cool video that someone posted, about the thing. With the cats? You can Google it, sure, but what if it was not an “Internet” thing — what if it was a “family” thing. Like your mom or your aunt or your sister or someone posted it, and you can’t remember when, but you really want to find it.
Facebook search will leave you cold.
2. No hashtags.
Oh sure, after Zuckerberg (tee-hee, spellcheck suggests “cocksucker” — for reals!) wasn’t able to buy Twitter, the whole “status” thing became much more Twitter-like. I kind of enjoy hitting the @ symbol and tagging friends in some posts. Nice that they stole the Twitter @ usage, too. No subtlety lost there.
But talk about half measures! How come I can’t use hashtags? Why stop at @ and not implement #? After all, I don’t just want to tag friends, I also want to tag subjects and themes and other things.
Perhaps this would also help with search?
3. Facebook e-mail? You mean F-mail? Yeah.
Let’s see — no folders, no forwarding, no control over your attachments? Fail.
4. No consistency.
I have a Facebook account, but I’m also the administrator of two Facebook “pages” — one for this blog, which you can “like” if you like, but is really just an RSS feed of blog posts, and one for the Brandon Sun, the daily newspaper that is my day job.
When I post something to my Facebook account, I have the option of adding a Photo, a Video, an Event or a Link to it.
But when I decide to post something from a Facebook Page that I administer, I instead have the option of adding a Link, a Photo, an Event or a Video.
Why on EARTH!!!! are they in a different order???
5. No control.
So, I administer a couple of Facebook Pages. Apparently, that is all I do, because God forbid that I also want to act on my own, as an individual. Sometimes, it is convenient to speak for the Page itself, but sometimes, I want to make a comment, or participate in a discussion as myself, not as “the Page.”
Facebook could easily fix this by making it comment as “the page” if I was on the page itself, or letting me comment as myself if I was looking at something in my own Facebook news feed. Since there is no way to “sign out” of administering a Page, there is no way for me to ever take off my Brandon Sun or my Absurd Intellectual hat.
(they are both awesome hats)
7. No expandability.
If I want to attach a link to a Facebook post, the site will attempt to cleverly decipher the link’s headline, if there is an appropriate thumbnail photo to go with it, and include the first paragraph or so of text.
If I upload a video — or my link is to a YouTube or a Vimeo page — it will allow my friends or followers to play the video right from the news feed. Awesome!
But haven’t they heard of music?
Sometimes, I would love to be able to share a song with my friends. I can share a music video on YouTube, but I can’t share an mp3? Ludicrous!
8. My friends like stupid things.
Long ago, I learned that you can permanently hide annoying Facebook apps like “Which howler monkey would you be?” and time-vampire games like FarmVille or Mafia Wars. Ugh.
But now that you can “like” just about any page on any participating site, I get a news feed that’s clogged with messages like:
Quentin and 3 other friends like OMG!! That girl SO did not know her boyfirned was listening in! ROFL!!! on I <3 stupid funny Shnizznet — dot com! CLICK HERE <<<<
And there is no way to hide it!
So I report it as spam.
