Noisy Social Networking

Last Friday, 22 Oct 2009, Facebook made another user interface change. This made me realize what is wrong and has always been wrong with a lot of social networking sites. It boils down to the signal-to-noise ratio.

I joined Facebook back in 2007 but after only 2 months, I deactivated my account. Why? Because the noise coming from Facebook is unbearable. The value of social networking was drowned by all the unnecessary news that Facebook kept shoving into my face. Not to mention the millions of apps that throngs my friends’ pages which made the site slow and meaningless.

Then, 3 months ago, I reactivated my account after seeing that they had (arguably) improved the look and feel of the site. This time round, things are slightly manageable and I find Facebook useful to a certain degree.

However, last Friday’s user interface change made the noise getting louder.

What Facebook did this is; they believed that everyone really really wants to know what all their friends/networks are up to, so, everything is now shown in the so called Live Feed. And, Facebook figures out some of those posting are worthy of a news status, so they are pinned in the News Feed.

First of all, no. I don’t go to Facebook to get the news. I go to news website to get news. And no, I don’t freaking care about who’s befriending who. All these are just useless information clogging up my bandwidth. And now there is also this “Leave a comment on this guy’s wall” or “Help this guy find more friend”. Really? That is so… cheap.

Here’s what I really want from Facebook, and perhaps other social networking sites too, is customize my feed. Let users choose what kind of updates they get and from whom should be highlighted. Leave the all activities feed there so maybe once a while I could look into it if I want to.

I'm thinking of abandoning Facebook. I've done it before.

The Browser Verdict

My verdict is in. Google Chrome is my browser of choice.

After installing it in back August, I find that I use it more and more, and today, I’d say 80% of browsing is done in Google Chrome.

The thing that sealed the deal; it's snappy. The app launch fast and renders pages fast. So far, Chrome has not crashed on me and I have version to date (3.0.195.27).

I still miss the address bar dropdown button though, and I’m not alone. There’s a Google Chrome forum for it. I have more than 8 sites that visit daily, so please Google, just give me the dropdown button.

Another thing that I’m not too fond is Chrome breaks the Windows interface. It doesn’t have a title bar when the window is maximize. Small price to pay for a bit more screen real estate, especially on the widescreen notebook.

As for the other browsers that I have, I still use IE every now and then. In fact, it is still my system's default browser. Honestly, there’s nothing to hate about IE. Since I cannot remove it from the OS, might as well use it every now and then.

Firefox on the other hand, has fallen from grace. Compared to Chrome, Firefox is sluggish. Especially with all the add-ons I've installed. I only use it if I need to get some Youtube videos locally and also the portable version. By the way, I no longer use Firefox in Ubuntu because I've removed Ubuntu! (Another story for another day).

There are news saying that add-ons are coming to Chrome. I hope it will not degrade the browser like what has happened to Firefox.

With the emergence on Chrome, I’m sure the people at Microsoft and Mozilla will come out with something new for their browsers, meaning, even more choices for the users.

I also doubt we far from when browser is just a browser; not until there’s a major paradigm shift in the desktop OS world.

Until then, I’d recommend everyone to install and use Google Chrome, if you haven’t done so.

Another Browser, Another Choice

OK, I'm impress. Google Chrome is fast. Now, let's see.....

I use IE because, well, I just do. Ever since IE 2.0. And IE 8 is actually a good web browser. I can't point to any outstanding feature but what it does, it does well. One thing I do want is a download manager. In terms of page viewing, I haven't found one that doesn't work.

I use Firefox, for a few reason; it's the default in Ubuntu, has portable version and very very customizable. But the latter seems to also be its undoing. I've found out that the more extension you install, the bloater, slower and unreliable Firefox gets. The other major annoyance with Firefox is the need to restart after every single update, be it the browser or the extensions. In its default form, Firefox works fine. In terms of page viewing, I don't find any difference with IE. I also love the so-called Awesome bar, ie, the address bar. It makes sense to have my mostly visited address pinned and sorted according to visit frequency.

For the record, I did have Opera on my system, and I have install/uninstall it a few times. It's an OK browser. One thing that bugs me about Opera (and we're talking about version 9 something here), it has this quirk in rendering images, where, if the image is not fully loaded, it will redraw (and you can see it) every time you scroll or switch tabs. Page view is fine. No extension as far as I'm aware. I can't put my finger on it, but there's something wrong with Opera. I just don't know what.

And now, I have Chrome. The sparse bare minimum user interface is so Google. I love the single address-cum-search input bar. It's very easy and intuitive. Actually both IE and Firefox can search from the address bar, but they provide a dedicated search input bar by default, which gives an impression that address and search don't mix. But with the current version (2.0.172.39), Chrome's address bar is missing something major to me; it doesn't have a drop down button! I don't get it. But I do like the tab handling. Dragging a tab out to open a new window is quite useful. I do wish they have IE’s colored tabs feature to show related tabs.

So now I ponder, do I really need another browser? Should I squeeze Chrome into my life? Maybe drop Firefox?

I do use a some Google services like Gmail, Docs and Blogger. Maybe these services work better in Chrome. I don't know, but that seems to be what I'm planning to do; use Google stuff on Chrome and see if there's anything extra I get from it. I'll report back after a few weeks.