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.