I'm Just Sharing

Facebook has been going through some mega changes lately, and most of them seem to be falling flat in the minds of many users. Personally, I’ve noticed that I’m not on Facebook as often as I was just months ago, and I hadn’t made the connection to it being allied with changes until very recently.

Of course, I’ve talked about Facebook before. The first time I wondered if it was truly a site for social networking because many people create groups that don’t have any real conversations, though there are pictures aplenty. The next time I wrote about them, I was actually introducing one of their major changes, that being eliminating what were called network pages, which were how most people were introduced into Facebook, by being assigned a region where they were from in some fashion. It was their attempt to open it up so that people didn’t have to search for an area to belong to, but it also hurt because now people didn’t even have a regional area, where they may know some people to get started, to join.

These days, the changes come fast and heavy. We now have another new look, as they’ve moved some things around. We have this stupid little bar at the bottom that has a chat feature and also indicates new notifications, which is actually elsewhere, along with any group or activities one might like to participate in; those are also in other areas on the site. One thing I keep having problems finding is what’s known as The Wall on each person’s page; I can’t figure out where it is on my page anymore, and that’s not a good thing.

Of course, we still have to deal with this concept of people deciding to add an application to their page and then sending a request to every person that happens to be in their friend list to join; the one thing Facebook did add was a way to block an application so you can only be asked once about something that you never want to add (people kept sending me this one application about “buying me”; you just don’t keep sending that to a black man in America). Facebook has never been the fastest loading page in the world, and some of the games they have slow things down further. Now there’s even talk that they’re thinking about adding music; the “MySpace”-ification of Facebook is underway. No sir, that’s not a good thing.

I’m not alone in my consternation. Here’s a link to Chris Pirillo’s site where he’s having a discussion with a long time Facebook user. In any case, I’m not ready to give up Facebook just yet. There’s always the possibility that one of these groups will step up to the plate and actually make it a business networking site that’s useful in some fashion, or even a site where you can manage your activities easier. I’m hopeful for Facebook.