25.3.09 If it doesnt make you happy, dont do it
Other reasons I might be tiring of Facebook are its constant unreliability and redesigns. Granted, the latest one (of its home page) had far better consultation with the user base than the major change last year, which must go down as 2008’s biggest online gaffe.
I didn’t object to the change because it was one of those that had to be experienced before one could form a decent opinion of it. It’s not that good, and I dislike the ‘Highlights’ column, where subscription to certain interest groups were recorded. As I put it on Twitter: I didn’t need to know that I had friends in to bondage. And as my friend Dan Gordon put it: he didn’t need to know that he had friends who liked Kim Kardashian. There are groups and fan pages and the one for Lucire, which I had set up, doesn’t seem to work properly. Prior to the latest round of changes, it took the Lucire ‘Insider’ RSS feed (which mobiles also use) and updated it whenever necessary. No longer: all last week I had to import articles manually, despite Facebook claiming, ‘If you confirm this import, we’ll check the feed every couple of hours for new posts you've made, and add anything we find to your Facebook notes.’ It hasn’t happened yet. I see notifications I don’t want, I find applications I never OKed as green-lighted on my privacy list, and now an automated task—something computers were meant to be good at—adding to my chores because on Facebook, it’s not automated. It’s all weakened the Facebook brand for me, one which was on a high back in the closing days of 2007. If I might borrow from David Aaker, my brand associations of Facebook aren’t positive any more and my perceived quality of it has gone right down. I’m glad Facebook has kept on growing, and I’m glad that the company can make a buck with it. I love it for the school reunion it let me put together last year and for providing me with tools to organize future ones. It is a marketing channel that I can’t ignore. But now, because it increases my labour and because it doesn’t increase any sense of leisure, being on it is a task rather than a pleasure. And social networking sites, as far as I know, should be about the latter. I should be happy to go on them. Given what I wrote earlier today, that’s exactly how I want it. Posted by Jack Yan, 10:00 Comments:
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