Facebook? Facelift more like.
Another Facebook Facelift. Grrr.
Why oh why oh why oh why oh why does Facebook keep changing?
I recently had call to get back into Facebook for a new business pitch (post-edit: we won). I knew it had changed and needed to clue up on the differences. It was broadly similar but, well, different. And on looking back at work I’d done in the past, I could see that the changes materially affected those Facebook pages too.
This was an annoyance for me, but I could imagine plenty of people out there trying to do the same thing as me pulling out their hair with frustration. You get a strategy together, you figure it all out, you build a beautiful page – and then it changes. So you have to adapt it all.
So it’s with further annoyance I just came across Techtree’s announcement that Facebook has changed yet again. As it says: “Facebook has tweaked its Live News feed to display only those posts that Facebook thinks would be useful for you and your network of friends.”
I’ve only just read this so I don’t know what implications this will have. But I do wish Facebook would get a grip. It imposes the Beacon advertising system. Then Facebook drops Beacon after howls of protest. Then Facebook says it owns everything on the site. Then Facebook changes its mind again, and takes the exact opposite tack of letting its users decide its terms.
Then decides to hell with that and changes anyway.
My life! When will this stop? The permanent beta’s annoying enough, and human beings don’t work that way. No matter how much we’re told we should embrace change, we find it annoying, stressful even. Just ask Alvin Tofler.
But I see something more fundamentally wrong here. Which is: Facebook don’t have a plan. They don’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing. So they make changes here and there to make the service ‘better’. It’s not ‘better’, it’s just ‘different’, and people don’t like ‘different’. How can we build ‘different’ into our strategies? Put in milestones every month or so entitled “Check whether Facebook has changed again”?
Honestly Mr Zuckerberg. Have a heart. Leave well alone. 300 million active users can’t be wrong can they?
[...] is a sight to behold. Without any regard for its users, Facebook is aiming for the stars. Yet another facelift has attempted to pre-empt the noisy saturation of our news feeds by introducing a distinction [...]