It's so popular to hate on Facebook these days that if ever I bring up any kind of qualm I have about how Facebook works, I'm labeled as a hater. It's just how these kinds of things go I guess. I don't let it get to me anymore, but it used to perturb me quite a bit. So to anybody who's going to construe any kind of legitimate and logical complaint about Facebook as mindless hatred, leave now.
The root of all of my frustrations with Facebook is that it's spurred a massive gold-rush of personal data mining by creating an environment in which developers can try to get you to agree to give them access to your personal profile information by installing apps and dangling a carrot out in front of the common user. Prime example of this is whenever I want to read an article hosted by Yahoo! that a friend of mine has shared on Facebook. All I want to do is click the link and be taken to Yahoo!'s article and read the damn thing. But, alas, I must be stopped by Yahoo!'s Facebook app, as it is the portal through which I must get to the article. No I don't want to install your app. I just want to read the article, not give you access to all of my personal information. And so I deny the app's requests and carry on through my news feed disappointed that Facebook actually impeded the social sharing that it's supposed to facilitate. Completely the opposite of how it was supposed to happen. Somewhere along the line, after Facebook rose to social networking dominance, it began to take on all kinds of other projects and sew them onto it's existing frame, in a stupid mission to become the only destination anybody has on the Internet. Games and Apps saw that anybody who produced content for the Internet could produce that same content within Facebook. And now what we have is this Frankenstein of a once well polished social network that tries to be too many other things, and that mission has gotten in the way of the only thing people really want to use a social network for: Sharing information. That is it. The one thing any social network is useful for. And now Facebook is allowing the free reign it's given 3rd party developers to make apps, to get in the way of itself. Which, to me at least, is absolutely infuriating. I should not be stopped from viewing the content that I am tempted with in my news feed. That is completely anti-productive for Facebook to do.
And another problem that has been beginning to piss me off lately is the intrusion of advertisements into my Timeline. I was perfectly fine with ads off to the side of every page. But when they actually appear within the content that I'm searching for in my or someone else's Timeline, it makes for an awesomely effective distraction and it's that much more difficult to find what I'm looking for. Which, again, is the exact opposite of what Facebook is supposed to do. Connecting people who share information and making that information easier to find is the prime directive, if you will, of a social network. So once again, you have Facebook getting in it's own way. And Facebook now being a publicly traded company, these kinds of things are just going to get worse now that there's investors to please.
Now, fortunately (or unfortunately, really), my friends still produce interesting enough content such that I haven't been willing to stop going to Facebook to see what they're up to, or what they're reading or sharing. But it's becoming more of a chore to check Facebook for me; becoming more of a headache every time I leave the site, because it's almost always because I can't stand being denied reading an interesting story for the sake of installing someone's app.
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