Dear Facebook,
Stop. Just stop updating.
Okay, I get that isn’t particularly reasonable. How about this: slow down and only update once a year, like most other software companies. While we’re at it – get a test group outside of the people in your company. Because the changes you’re making? No one I know, no one on my newsfeed likes them.
1. We don’t want you to select our top stories. I don’t care how many people are commenting on something. Odds are it’s about a baseball game, or worse a college football game, and I don’t give a shit. Strangely, a lot of people who even like these sports don’t care because they like different teams. (It may also be a maudlin one sentence incomprehensible update and since I’m no longer in my twenties I don’t particularly care about these either.) I can hide someone from my feed if I don’t want to see their political ranting or religious posturing. Assume that if I don’t hide someone I want to read everything they post, or scroll by on my own.
2. We don’t want other people tagging us in photos. We want the option to tag ourselves, but we don’t want people seeing “just any” picture of us. For most of us over the age of 30 this has nothing to do with our college friends scanning in pictures of us at 20 doing shots or dancing on tables – at 33 my employer no longer cares what I did at 20, they don’t even care about my GPA as much as they care about my last 10 years of professional experience. We care that someone is putting photos online where we look fat, or if we have kids where their faces show or have too many details so that they can be kidnapped.
3. Privacy is important. It’s not an afterthought. Make it easy, and err on the side of “conservative.” I have had to show countless people how to make filters on their facebook, because they didn’t know it was an option. Advertise these things, make them user friendly, and make them work.
4. Speaking of making it work – instead of changing the layout and the newsfeed please, focus on the stuff on your site that needs to function and doesn’t. The back button on your mobile site hasn’t worked in a year. Make an app that is functional and is as similar to your website as possible. Last, but not least, fix your nearly useless picture viewer. (There is nothing more frustrating than having every third photo manifest as a tiny, scrolling, blue bar that never loads over a little red x.)
Let me put it in terms you can understand: you know how every time Microsoft updates windows or office they alienate a bunch of people and it takes a year for people to adapt and come around? You do this every week to three months to some degree. Stop it, you’re pissing people off, and if my intuition tells me anything GooglePlus is only going to get better and better. (You see, Google has a history of figuring out what people like and making improvements to enhance those features.)
That, or make it so we can really delete our profiles, because that, too, is reading out at an incomprehensible level on the bullshit meter.
There you have it. And I’m some who actually likes change.
Love, Patti
P.S. I apologize for my commas, which I’m sure are out of control as usual. My editor is still asleep and I’m agitated.