October 23rd, 2009
Facebook launches confusing, counterintuitive, broken UI
When you login to Facebook today, you might notice a slightly different news feed.
There is a link that says “View Live Feed”… but wait. What makes something “news” and what makes something “live”? Okay, I’ll click the new button.
When I click the new “View Live Feed” button, I’m taken to a new page that shows stuff other than status; the stuff that used to be in the news feed like friend relationships, event RSVPs, and group joins.
But I thought it’s supposed to be live and updating in real time? Okay, I’ll wait.
…
…
Nothing’s updating. I had to hit refresh to see new posts in my live feed. Even the old “View new posts” link that used to come up every few minutes is gone.
Facebook is making an Ajax call on this page, but it’s returning an error:
Okay, back to news view.
Wait, why is there a post from my friend Nini that says “Go Raiders” from yesterday at 10:19 a.m? What makes that news and the other thousands of posts per hour that have happened since then… not visible?
Stuff in my “news” feed is not in any particular order either.
What is going on here? For someone who uses Facebook a lot, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to look at. Imagine how the average user will feel.
The worst thing you can do as a software team is release something and have it blow up in your face. Please fix this guys…
There was no warning to users about the change, only a post on Facebook’s blog explaining why the changes were made and what they mean.
They’re messin with the social graph…
The other thing about this taylored news feed is that I didn’t decide what was important news… Facebook did. I think this needs to be more in the hands of the users.
Andrew Mager is a web developer at Ning, Inc. in Palo Alto. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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