One Of The Many Reasons That Facebook Sux

And yes, I know it’s the eve of the IPO. Ask me if I care.

First I get an invite from someone to friend them. I’ve never heard of them. I go to the Facebook page, and there’s no obvious place to see where people who invited you are. And when I follow the link in the email with the invitation, does it take me to that person’s invitation? No. Of course not. It takes me to the page of suggested friends and invitations, and I have to scroll down to find this particular one. There is absolutely no excuse for any of this in this day and age of web technology.

But wait! It gets worse.

The guy who invited me has zero information about himself publicly available, which is OK, I guess, but I still have no reason to accept FB friendship. It doesn’t even show me if we have friends in common (though maybe the fact that it doesn’t do that is a sign that we don’t, but it would be nice if it were more explicit). So I look at the options for dealing with his invitation. There are two. Delete invitation, or accept it. There is not option (c), which is the one I want, which is “Send an FB message to him to ask him who the eff he is, and why I should friend him”.

Really, folks, does it have to be this hard?

19 thoughts on “One Of The Many Reasons That Facebook Sux”

  1. You can click on their profile and message them even if you have restricted access.

  2. but it would be nice if it were more explicit

    I think that’s a good summary of their business plan.

  3. I’m not on Facebook at all, and sometimes I get e-mails asking me to “friend” someone. I just delete them.

    1. I’ve gotten a number of these too. IF it’s someone I know, I reply telling them that I don’t FB, tweet, twit, twaddle nor twist and shout. People I know usually ‘get it’, because they know I don’t ‘friend’ that easily face to face either.

      But people I don’t know, or barely know have written me some nasty notes about WHY I should get involved in [enter online fad on the minute here]. I usually re-reply, and fill my e-mails with shouting, screaming, foul words and such.

      Then, I ask them, as my last sentence,
      .
      “Now, do you REALLY want to be my ‘friend’ “?
      (or whatever that digital connection du jour comprises)
      .
      I don’t get many of those any more, but I’m still that stick in the mud who doesn’t, and never did, ‘FWD’ those e-mails about kids in France, who want the Guinness World Record for most e-mails. I don’t send on to 10 of my closest friends pictures of angels shaped like clouds, ufo’s shaped like a 747 puppies sleeping with large iguana or clouds shaped like angels, ufos shaped like Rosie O’Donnel.

      I’ve got more important things to do. Like write foolish, rambling cr@p in here!

  4. Isn’t it funny how MySpace had the more customizable and enriching product but lost out to FB because people were too lazy to put in any effort to set up their page?

    1. Wodun,

      Not really, that is what killed Geocities, the need to make your own page.

  5. I’m not on Facebook, nor will I be. Their penchant for tracking members across other sites is reprehensible to me. I don’t bother with Twitter or Google+ or the other networking sites either; the last thing I need are time-burners, especially ones that come with massive privacy drawbacks.

    I might be the only person under 40 who loathes this stuff, but loathe it I do.

  6. As one wag put it, “I’m outraged that a free Internet site I’m not obliged to use has made subtle changes that mildly inconvenience me!”

  7. I’ve begun to consider social network invites about as desirable as calls from phone solicitors. If someone I know needs to communicate with me they can send me a email.

  8. Only reason I have an account is so I can see what my kids post.

    Some people apparently have a thing about collecting as many “friends” as they can…whether they know them or not. Makes no sense to me at all…

    1. LCB,

      Same here, to keep touch with my family. For my professional contacts I use Linkedin, which is what it was designed for.

  9. The way LinkedIn handles this issue os much more sensible. If you try to “friend” someone who you don’t really know, it forces you to indicate how you are connected. If you say it is a business connection, it forces you to select from companies you have listed in your profile. If you cannot find any pre-defined – and legitimate – connection, it forces you to write a note explaining to the person why they should add you to their network. Oh, and it also uses default text strongly discouraging “random” friend requests from people you don’t really know.

    I’m not actually a huge LinkedIn fan overall, but I do think their methodology for this is far better at solving (or at least trying to minimize) the problem you outline, here.

  10. As I have said before, it would have been nice if Zuckerberg had stayed at Harvard long enough to be introduced to the concept of software engineering.

    1. There’s no such thing as software engineering. It’s not only a fraud, it’s why we remain in our current state. Professors teaching that there is, to gullible students that believe whatever they read keeps us where we are.

      The missing ingredient is elegance. Embrace elegance and real software engineering might emerge. Software experts and especially their young students have no idea what elegance means in regard to software.

  11. 99% of all software sucks for the same reason. Poor human interfaces. This is complicated by the fact that the development tools suck as well. It amazes me that we are this far into the age of the web and haven’t got better tools to work with.

    I’m not in a place where I can work on it now, but I’ve had an idea for a simple, powerful editor/compiler that would make both client and server side executables. It would have some elements of Euphoria because powerful algorithms are often trivial in that language and much easier to understand than in APL for example. I just can’t do it yet (if ever.)

    VB6 for all it’s flaws (and there were many) is still the best development environment ever created (not for all thing, but a large subset.) Web development not being part of that subset (mostly.)

    I guess if it were easy it would be done by now. I’m not Elon Musk.

Comments are closed.