I’ve been using facebook for a very long time (since 2006, sophmore year of highschool) and during that time I’ve been tracking along with the progression of change that occurred as the makers monthly tweak and alter the site. It’s pretty amazing the stuff that they’ve added on since I first started, and the site has become a whole lot fancier. But that being said, I liked it a lot better at the beginning to be honest.
It was a lot simpler and a lot more useful, and if you used myspace before facebook, then you know exactly what I mean. Compared to other social media sites, facebook had a very clean and tidy feel. I wasn’t constantly bombarded with friend requests from people I didn’t know or overwhelmed with useless trivia of people I barely knew (I don’t even want that from people I DO know). My opinion of facebook back in 2006 was similar to the way some people feel about “Linked-in”.
Useful
Back then, you could easily create and maintain events, or join groups of interest for things that you were actually interested in. People posted status’ whenever they felt like they had something important to say, and you didn’t really need to sift through the newsfeed to find information that was actually relevant to you.
All that started changing after myspace fell out of popularity and Facebook had cornered the social media market. It wasn’t as though Facebook lost all the functionality that it had in the beginning, but it started adding a lot of junk that crowded out the useful features. Third-party game applications started popping up and cluttering the requests list choking out the useful events requests. The newsfeed started to be flooded with every action and twitch your ‘friends’ made, and instead of important stuff like “this person is now engaged/married/deceased” or “so and so moved to Africa”, now you’re forced to view small nuanced things such as what people ‘like’.
Maybe it seems like I just don’t like change or that I’m whining about something silly, but I honestly feel like facebook is wasting my time and decreasing the quality of life for its 139 million users.
But there is a good fix to wasting time on facebook that I found. It’s second only to just SPENDING LESS TIME on Facebook and the Internet, which I highly recommend. Like if you don’t really know me, the only reasons you would be reading this is if I’m a lot more interesting than I thought, or you have absolutely no life, and I highly doubt its the former. But spending less time on facebook is obvious, so what about returning functionality so that when you DO use it, you actually get some value out of that time?
One of the first features is hiding stuff. Hiding stuff is great cause after you do it, an option pops up to hide other stuff like it. If you do this every time you see something you don’t give a rats behind about, in about a week your newsfeed clutter is cut in half.
Another wonderful feature is a friend’s list called “Acquaintances” that they added last September, but that I didn’t discover until this morning. And I just put more than half of the people in my friends list on there. With the “hiding” option, I don’t have to look at all the annoying useless crap people post, but now with the “Aquaintance” feature, I don’t have to look at all the annoying useless crap people I don’t really have any connection to post.
yay
