It was the shot heard around the world as midnight approached each time zone and the statuses began to become more angry and unprintable- “What have they done to Facebook now?” “This is the second major change in nearly two weeks?” “I can’t access anything now!”
Some users found early on that the way to get the old layout back for the moment was to set the default language back to English UK-an area of the site that hadn’t met with the changes yet. As morning approached, no matter what default language you were under the page was uniform with its strange little blue tabs, drop down boxes that dont drop down, pop ups everywhere.
“It’s like my friends list threw on my computer screen,” said one user.
I spent a good half hour trying to figure out how to open thing, trying to find recent news which it seemed to be the default setting as top news was the only choice, even typing out a status required the hitting of a status button as there was no default “status box” on the screen anymore. God forbid you wanted to add a picture. It is even worse if you have multiple pages, like I do for my media group I co-own and had to reconfigure multiple pages to be usable and re-add page administrators since it lost some of their accounts through the cross over.
Another Facebook friend said it right, “I feel like an elderly person using the computer for the first time.”
I think I will be using my Facebook app on my phone more for the time being as I am holding out on the Google + bandwagon.
Granted, for most of us, Facebook is a free service unless you have an advanced mobile application, but that still doesn’t give the company the moral right to jack the users around because they will leave for a better service. I think what grounds everyone to Facebook is that there really hasn’t been a better option yet and people hate having to move all their information and find all their friends again online through a new system. Let’s face it, Facebook has had the longevity because there is nothing else to strive for. How many mobile phones come with applications for Friendster, and MySpace anymore? For this company to avoid going defunct, actually listen to the feedback of the users! The nice clean, comfortable layout of the system was just fine and what keeps businesses of all types, and personal users running to the computer several times a day. We carry Facebook in our pockets on internet enabled devices and spend all day checking up on friends, our favorite actors, bands, movies. Keep it simple. No one wants to struggle to find information. Be reliable as you have been in the past with few major outages, keep the reputation that checking Facebook is part of your everyday life. Don’t make the users mad. In a dorm room somewhere is another computer genius somewhere hoping to invent the next best thing. Hold them off as long as you can.