I flipped out last week when Facebook put a comment box with your face next to it after every item. I posted a status update and I got a few people to 'like' it and then a friend commented about how irritating it was to see your face so often on a page. As I worked through the tidal wave of negative comments about the new design, the same comment - people hate seeing their own signature icon so often - kept popping up.
Soon after, FB removed the quirk from its layout, but surely if they had just put the design in front of ten people they would have been able to see how much it freaked people out. It makes me wonder. Does FB test its user experience before making its changes?
I will say that the last big change was largely positive because of what it took away and how much more filtering I could do.
The crappy applications that all my friends kept stupidly (OK, unwisely) signing up for were now relegated to a 'boxes' tab on their profiles so that it didn't feel so 'MySpace'. And I could filter my feed so that I didn't have to see so much of the app spam I was getting. The sliders and the privacy controls were specific and easy enough to use.
Now it seems like they've taken a step back. There is app spam everywhere asking if I'll take a quiz about music from the 70's. From three of my friends. Repeated for each friend. And then the same three friends asking me to take a bleeding quiz, except now for the 90's. Repeated for each friend. I can't turn the app spam off. And it's making me crazy. (Those of you spamming me with requests to join a group complaining about the new Facebook design are part of the problem. You do not get a dispensation simply because of your intent.)
You don't get the streamlined gossip line that made FB so addictive. Instead you have the same fire hose of unfiltered, pressurised crap you get on Twitter. I don't want each of my photos to show up as a separate post, clogging up my friends' feeds. (And I certainly don't want my friends' photos clogging up my feed either!)
I don't need to see a giant icon of my friends next to each event because I already know who they are and what they look like. The genius of Facebook was the feeling that it was all the best gossip about the friends I care about. Now it's just back to something approximating Twitter - indiscriminate crap everywhere from everyone.
And yet I persevere with the service. I keep hoping that I'll show up on FB and everything will be back to the way it was. I get enough of the unfiltered stuff on Twitter and on Google Reader and in my work e-mail. I spend at least half of my brain power choosing what to ignore in life and it's got so complicated that my head actually hurts when I get home. Facebook used to be a respite. If it's going to be just another chore, I might just need to block it all out.
