Rant #17: Facebook
Posted 10.26.2010
ANNOYANCE LEVEL: 4
Alright, it's time to tear into this beast! Anyone that's known me for a while (read: since MySpace days) knows that I was super-reluctant to sign up with Facebook. There are a lot of reasons for this, many of which STILL hold true. For a long time, I never understood how Facebook "beat" MySpace. I do now, but hold that thought, we'll come back to it later on. When Facebook came out, I ignored the site as everyone I knew
began making the switch. Many kept MySpace as well but didn't use it as
much (not that I personally used it much myself, but being anti-social
kinda warrants that), and pretty soon there wasn't a point to log in
anymore, aside to post a new Rant (these rants got their start on
MySpace, by the way, but you probably know that from the early ones). So anyway, there were several things that kept me off of Farcebook (<- not a spelling error) for so long, and we're gonna talk about those first.
First off, the name. Face... Book. Seriously? That's the best they could come up with? It sounds SO gay. Like another Xanga, it totally sounds like a social networking site that is destined to fail - yet somehow, look at it today. It's along the lines of anything with a generic-ish name (granted, MySpace has a pretty lame name as well - anything with "My" at the start does). But Facebook? More like Fagbook... or Fuckthis... or WhythefuckingshitdoIwanttoabandonMySpaceforthispieceofshitsite? Anyway, getting past the Failbook name...
The second thing I hate about it is how every fucking profile looks the same. There is ZERO customization as far as background, colors, etc, and that annoys the shit out of me. MySpace was awesome for the ability to customize your profile to your liking, so long as you know some HTML, or can copy/paste prefabricated profile code. With Facebook, you can customize ONE THING (aside from information that shows up on the profile itself): The fucking profile picture. Well fuck-a-doodle-doo, sign me up right away for that one! Come on assholes, can't we just have a least a little bit of choice to what our pages look like? Background colors? Text colors? Maybe a theme?
Another thing I hate about it is its wicked popularity (but I tend to hate things that are super popular *ahem, Twilight - though I hate that mainly because the vampires in it are bullshit*) and how it is EVERYWHERE. My phone came with it installed and already on the 'desktop'. It's on the radio in commercials whenever they're not overplaying the same damn songs, it's probably going to be in your car one day, press a button and get voice-read updates, they'll have little kiosks spread around town or the mall for the sole purpose of checking Facebook for a quarter (I'd rather save that quarter to wipe my ass in a pay toilet.), they've got it on the major game consoles, at least 360 and PS3, not sure about Wii, eventually they'll make some fuckin' sunglasses with monitors built in and a wireless signal that read your brainwaves to manipulate your Facebook... fuck!
Anyway, those are just complaints I had about it BEFORE I actually joined the madness. Now that I have, I have even more complaints... and this is just BASIC SHIT that makes no sense.
So I log in, and I wanna send a message to a friend (like a mail message, not an instant one), so I gotta find that friend in my list. So on the left, there's this link called "Friends" - ah, there's my friends. So I click it... and guess what? NO FRIENDS LIST, this is the "Find Friends" option in disguise. WHAT THE FUCK? It takes you to a page where you can sync up your friends list to pretty much any social networking service, and shows People You May Know, but not the people that are on your godballing friends list. That's like wiping before you poop, it doesn't make any fucking sense. So where the hell is the friends list?! I spent about 5 minutes looking for it the first time. You have to view your actual profile to find the friends list. WHY? Isn't that the purpose of the Home screen, to manage mail, messages, streams, etc? What the ass is this shit? Facebook devs -- if you can read this, FIX THAT SHIT! (Edit: There is a small link at the top of this section now called "Manage Friend List", which gets you to your friends, but it's still dumb that it's a tiny link and not the sole focus of the page.)
The other thing that annoys me is the way the Photos system works. Sure I'm not a huge picture taker, I don't upload 100+ pictures at a time... but the ones I do add, it is SUCH a bitch to work with. I *still* have a bitch of a time finding the cryptic-ass place to upload pictures. (Edit: Now there's a handy button right on the main page for it, though it's small and easily overlooked.) In fact, I *cannot* see how to do it unless an album is totally empty, then there's a link right in front of you to add some (and I'm looking through it with each sentence to try and figure it out as I write this, and it's fucking worthless.) EVERY SINGLE ALBUM NEEDS A GOD DAMNED BUTTON TO ADD PHOTOS, YOU FUCKPOLES. You are useless to society with this janky-ass photo system. While I'm on the subject of the shitty photo system, get this. The other day, I went through my hard drive and sorted about 40-some pictures from a trip to West Virginia last November, and tried uploading them to Facebook. When they finished, I clicked some cryptic button and ... they all disappeared. It was something like "Skip this step", maybe? And the photos were gone. The album was still there, of course, but zero pictures. I thought, 'wtf did I just click and why did it just waste all this time?' So anyway, I reuploaded the pictures -- they compressed just fine, but just SAT THERE during the upload phase. I tried six-ish times before I attempted to upload a single picture instead, and it too just fucking sat there. While it did this, I uploaded those 40+ pictures to MySpace quickly and easily without a single issue - and when I was done, and labeled them as I wished, I checked back with Facebook to see if the upload was done... Nope! I'm not making this up either! Check Twitter, I made a note of it when it happened a while back. What a piece of shit. Fuck you, Fuckbook. Fuck you.
Now, on a positive note, Facebook does have some decent qualities. Not enough that I like it, but still. For example, it runs much faster than MySpace as far as page loading goes. This is probably due to the shitty cookie-cutter profiles - but said profiles are a double-edged sword. I hate them because they're bland, but I like them because people can't flood their profile with animated .gif images that just make them look like an easy score (ahem, slut) and shitty surveys and whatnot. The instant messaging works (just as well as MySpace's, if not better and faster), and overall, updating it is pretty smooth and quick, once you figure out WHERE to do that shit, since it's cryptic as all hell. It feels like I'm playing MYST or some shit. The best quality is, perhaps, the ability to find people you know, since it displays Sarah Lane (the name is off the top of my head, btw, not anyone I actually know) as Sarah Lane, not "Loveless Angelic Babydoll", so you can stalk find people easily. The bottom line is, I fucking hate it, but I tolerate using it on occasion. Maybe if I could change my background to black and the colors to a purple-ish theme, I wouldn't want to gag when I look at the site, but oh well.
Oh, I hate Apps also. They're so lame, for the most part, and if there's a "Block All App Invites" button, please God let someone point it out to me after this. Facebook...
First off, the name. Face... Book. Seriously? That's the best they could come up with? It sounds SO gay. Like another Xanga, it totally sounds like a social networking site that is destined to fail - yet somehow, look at it today. It's along the lines of anything with a generic-ish name (granted, MySpace has a pretty lame name as well - anything with "My" at the start does). But Facebook? More like Fagbook... or Fuckthis... or WhythefuckingshitdoIwanttoabandonMySpaceforthispieceofshitsite? Anyway, getting past the Failbook name...
The second thing I hate about it is how every fucking profile looks the same. There is ZERO customization as far as background, colors, etc, and that annoys the shit out of me. MySpace was awesome for the ability to customize your profile to your liking, so long as you know some HTML, or can copy/paste prefabricated profile code. With Facebook, you can customize ONE THING (aside from information that shows up on the profile itself): The fucking profile picture. Well fuck-a-doodle-doo, sign me up right away for that one! Come on assholes, can't we just have a least a little bit of choice to what our pages look like? Background colors? Text colors? Maybe a theme?
Another thing I hate about it is its wicked popularity (but I tend to hate things that are super popular *ahem, Twilight - though I hate that mainly because the vampires in it are bullshit*) and how it is EVERYWHERE. My phone came with it installed and already on the 'desktop'. It's on the radio in commercials whenever they're not overplaying the same damn songs, it's probably going to be in your car one day, press a button and get voice-read updates, they'll have little kiosks spread around town or the mall for the sole purpose of checking Facebook for a quarter (I'd rather save that quarter to wipe my ass in a pay toilet.), they've got it on the major game consoles, at least 360 and PS3, not sure about Wii, eventually they'll make some fuckin' sunglasses with monitors built in and a wireless signal that read your brainwaves to manipulate your Facebook... fuck!
Anyway, those are just complaints I had about it BEFORE I actually joined the madness. Now that I have, I have even more complaints... and this is just BASIC SHIT that makes no sense.
So I log in, and I wanna send a message to a friend (like a mail message, not an instant one), so I gotta find that friend in my list. So on the left, there's this link called "Friends" - ah, there's my friends. So I click it... and guess what? NO FRIENDS LIST, this is the "Find Friends" option in disguise. WHAT THE FUCK? It takes you to a page where you can sync up your friends list to pretty much any social networking service, and shows People You May Know, but not the people that are on your godballing friends list. That's like wiping before you poop, it doesn't make any fucking sense. So where the hell is the friends list?! I spent about 5 minutes looking for it the first time. You have to view your actual profile to find the friends list. WHY? Isn't that the purpose of the Home screen, to manage mail, messages, streams, etc? What the ass is this shit? Facebook devs -- if you can read this, FIX THAT SHIT! (Edit: There is a small link at the top of this section now called "Manage Friend List", which gets you to your friends, but it's still dumb that it's a tiny link and not the sole focus of the page.)
The other thing that annoys me is the way the Photos system works. Sure I'm not a huge picture taker, I don't upload 100+ pictures at a time... but the ones I do add, it is SUCH a bitch to work with. I *still* have a bitch of a time finding the cryptic-ass place to upload pictures. (Edit: Now there's a handy button right on the main page for it, though it's small and easily overlooked.) In fact, I *cannot* see how to do it unless an album is totally empty, then there's a link right in front of you to add some (and I'm looking through it with each sentence to try and figure it out as I write this, and it's fucking worthless.) EVERY SINGLE ALBUM NEEDS A GOD DAMNED BUTTON TO ADD PHOTOS, YOU FUCKPOLES. You are useless to society with this janky-ass photo system. While I'm on the subject of the shitty photo system, get this. The other day, I went through my hard drive and sorted about 40-some pictures from a trip to West Virginia last November, and tried uploading them to Facebook. When they finished, I clicked some cryptic button and ... they all disappeared. It was something like "Skip this step", maybe? And the photos were gone. The album was still there, of course, but zero pictures. I thought, 'wtf did I just click and why did it just waste all this time?' So anyway, I reuploaded the pictures -- they compressed just fine, but just SAT THERE during the upload phase. I tried six-ish times before I attempted to upload a single picture instead, and it too just fucking sat there. While it did this, I uploaded those 40+ pictures to MySpace quickly and easily without a single issue - and when I was done, and labeled them as I wished, I checked back with Facebook to see if the upload was done... Nope! I'm not making this up either! Check Twitter, I made a note of it when it happened a while back. What a piece of shit. Fuck you, Fuckbook. Fuck you.
Now, on a positive note, Facebook does have some decent qualities. Not enough that I like it, but still. For example, it runs much faster than MySpace as far as page loading goes. This is probably due to the shitty cookie-cutter profiles - but said profiles are a double-edged sword. I hate them because they're bland, but I like them because people can't flood their profile with animated .gif images that just make them look like an easy score (ahem, slut) and shitty surveys and whatnot. The instant messaging works (just as well as MySpace's, if not better and faster), and overall, updating it is pretty smooth and quick, once you figure out WHERE to do that shit, since it's cryptic as all hell. It feels like I'm playing MYST or some shit. The best quality is, perhaps, the ability to find people you know, since it displays Sarah Lane (the name is off the top of my head, btw, not anyone I actually know) as Sarah Lane, not "Loveless Angelic Babydoll", so you can stalk find people easily. The bottom line is, I fucking hate it, but I tolerate using it on occasion. Maybe if I could change my background to black and the colors to a purple-ish theme, I wouldn't want to gag when I look at the site, but oh well.
Oh, I hate Apps also. They're so lame, for the most part, and if there's a "Block All App Invites" button, please God let someone point it out to me after this. Facebook...
FUCK YOU!!!