Facebook Review

UPDATED REVIEW!!!I was on Facebook for a while. I found it to be tedious and burdensome, so I de-activated my profile. I stopped going on there in April of 2009. In September of 2009, I decided to get back on Facebook and see if I liked it any better. Here are my previous beefs with Facebook and how they were improved:

First problem: Anyone can see your photo albums. If a friend comments on your photo, all their friends can see the album. Then if that friend comments, all of their friends can see it, so basically a photo can end up going viral all over Facebook.

Solution: You can set privacy levels for albums. That is pretty cool, because it's not one privacy level for all of your photos, it can be different privacies for different albums. You can pick "everyone," "all friends and networks," "friends of friends," and "friends only." Great!

Second problem: Stupid quizzes. For some reason, people love to take stupid quizzes on Facebook. "What should be the first letter of your lover's name?" "How good of a kisser are you?" "Are you pregnant?" "How SeXXXy Are You?" "What Twilight character are you?" are some. But now since I have been on there, people are using Facebook apps like daily horoscope and polls. People take these quizzes and the results are as dumb as the quizzes. They junk up your wall and you have to pick through the idiocy to look at updates you really want to see.

Solution: Selective blocking! Many times when your friends see a stupid quiz, they go en masse to take it too. Now you know what the first letter of 85 peoples' lovers' first names should be. If (when) you see a stupid quiz you don't care about go to the right side of it, and a "hide" menu pops up. You can hide that person's updates from your news feed, or YAY! you can hide all future results from just that quiz!!! If you block the quiz on the first person, the next 84 results will not show up.

This is especially useful for when your friends start playing games like Mafia Wars, Farmville, Farm Town and Farkle. Every time they level-up or get an award the huge graphic shows up in your feed whether you are playing or not. Now you can block the results of quizzes and games while still seeing status updates from your friends. Great!

Problem: Fake friends, inane updates.

Solution (a): Society. I like my friends much better now that I do not see all the results of their quizzes and games they are playing. Some people think it helps their Facebook "street cred" to rack up hundreds of friends. I won't send a friend request to someone who has hundreds of friends, and I don't accept requests from people who are looking to add to their statistics.

Solution (b): Seeing their profile first. Before, if you searched for someone, the results were their profile picture, network, and list of friends. Now you can set exactly what someone sees when they look for you. They can see all that information, but you can also choose to show them your status updates, photos, pages you are a fan of, and basically anything on your profile page. If you choose, someone can see your entire profile. I like this, because if you are just wondering how someone from your past is doing, you might be able to see if they have their profile information showing. Before, the only way you could see that information was to become their friend. Now you can just check in without them knowing or having to see their updates in your news feed. Not everyone shows everything, but a lot of people show more than just their name now.

Improvement: Right-hand highlights sidebar. On the right side of your feed, it shows thumbnails of pages your friends are fans of, groups they joined and photos they commented on. Those things used to junk up your news feed too.

Improvement: Requests sidebar above highlights. All the requests you get to join groups, friends, games and the like are accessible and easily seen in the upper right hand corner of your news feed. It only shows the first three or four and then you click "See All" to go to a screen and see all your requests. Compact and simple.

Improvement: Fan pages updates available in your news feed. It's like Twitter only better! For instance, I am a fan of TMZ. TMZ's updates show in my news feed, and I can see peoples' comments and add mine right under! On Twitter it can be confusing because you can get one side of a conversation. If someone on Twitter sends a message like @TMZ what time slot is your show on in the Central Time zone? You don't see that. All you see is the "@reply." So in your Twitter feed, all you see is @pitcherday 7 PM. You have no idea what the original question is unless you navigate over to TMZ's profile page.

On Twitter, if you don't want to see TMZ's updates, you have to "unfollow" them. Then they lose a follower, and their Twitter street cred goes down. On Facebook, you can still stay a fan and just hide the updates on and off. I prefer Facebook to Twitter on this. There is no character limit either and they can post a photo. You don't have to navigate to TwitPic to see it. However, not everyone on Twitter is on Facebook. I do like to keep my Twitter account, because that's a different type of animal, but the convenience of getting some of my updates on Facebook instead is great!

Improvement: Can use screen names. You don't have to use your full first and last names. You don't even need to use a real name at all. They are pretty good with not letting people hijack others' real names or using offensive screen names.

Improvement: Let others see your Facebook profile through use of a unique domain name. Again, no "friending" required!

Well, all these improvements only led to one very small problem for me: Increased spam comments. Since they allow people to have accounts without using their real names, people open accounts just to post spam messages (work at home, Acai berry diets) on fan pages. Sometimes, they will post abbreviated URL's for phishing sites. I would not click on an abbreviated URL from Facebook, even if someone from your friend list posted it. You don't know where they got it from.

All in all, Facebook has come forward in leaps and bounds since I last used it. I am very happy with this site and consider it to be an excellent social networking tool!