Would you say goodbye to the FB?

Back in the ages of early social media, I turned to Facebook to find as many friends as I could before I went to college my freshman year. “Hey [insert name here], it says you are living in [insert dormitory here], like, OMG let’s meet up and do our laundry together or something!”

Facebook was there for all my major college needs, and I quickly came to depend on the status update to let people know I was really fun/cool/endearing, busily tagged myself in pictures, and coyly searched for the cute boy in my Spanish class…

Then things started to change.

The mom friend request. The 13-year-old sister friend request. The 13-year-old sister’s friend’s friend request. The sparkly new mini-feed, which loaded itself and pressured me into talking to people on Facebook I forgot I was friends with. (“Bill is lonely. Reconnect!” Um, Facebook? Chill your jets, Bill is lonely because he peed his bed Sunday morning after our first football home game.) And now, Facebook is begging you to check in with Facebook Places.

Oh, goody.
And by “goody” I mean, “WTF IS YOUR DEAL, FACEBOOK?!”

I can’t count how many times I wanted to meet the people who were changing the online community I had built, take them by the shoulders and shake the ‘idiot’ right out of them. How many times I drew a line in the sand and threatened to say goodbye to FB forever.

But would I really?

Well, that option is becoming reality as a barrage new social networks come our way. One of which will give us the opportunity to go back to the way things were so many years ago: college kids only. Read More »

So, I was out at the bar with some coworkers last week, and a guy started talking about “The New Facebook.”

“There’s a ‘new’ Facebook?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Is it bad that I want to go home right now just to try it out?”

“Definitely,” I responded. “Stay here and get drunk. New Facebook will be waiting when the bar closes.”

Facebook has had quite the impact on American pop culture. I mean, really? This guy wanted to leave the bar to try it!? Whenever there’s even a minimal change in the layout and operation of the social network, it causes an uproar.

Remember when mini-feed first popped up? Immediately, groups sprouted all over the internet:

“Down with Mini-Feed!”

“Boycott F/B if They Don’t Get Rid of Mini-Feed Immediately!”

“Facebook Makes Stalking Easier with Mini-Feed!”

You get the point. Of course, now we’re all used to the program, and many of us keep updated via mini-feed every day: “Hey, I saw on Mini-Feed that you got a new job, congratulations!”

So, even though I’m hesitant to add too many applications (I don’t like that we have to check a box giving the ‘application’ full access to the info in our profiles), and even though I’m fully content keeping tabs on my friends the “old way,” I decided to check out the hullabaloo that is The New Facebook. Read More »

I write the following with the understanding that no matter how annoying Facebook can be, it will never be more annoying than Myspace. (Editor’s Note: I am not so sure…) And I will not stop using Facebook because of these things.

10. People You May Know. Otherwise known as “People that you don’t know well enough to be friends with”, “People who have rejected your friend request”, or “People you hate and would never friend even if their lives somehow depended on you friending them.” Facebook has been around long enough that if you haven’t found your friend yet, and he or she hasn’t found you, then you probably aren’t very good friends to begin with.

9. The Mini-Feed. Because you need constant reminder of the things you’ve recently done or said. Or applications you’ve added. Or songs you’ve listened to. Or things you’ve edited. The mini feed takes up like ¼ of your page (unless you are a dirty application whore: see below) and when you try to delete things, it keeps adding other things from days and weeks ago.

8. The Education and Work box. I say this is annoying, but it’s honestly the first thing I look at on someone else’s page. I do it because I am a masochist and I like to hurt myself by seeing how well these people that I hardly know are doing in places that I would love to move to. Read More »