found drama

Although I will argue that my judgment was impaired, A. talked me into creating a Facebook profile two nights ago.  I don’t really remember the circumstances or her rationale.  But she made an impassioned plea that on some level resonated with me, for better or worse.  So there I am.  Time will tell if this was foolish or not.  Leaning toward “not”.  That said, some first impressions:

1. To echo what tons of other folks have said:  it has a nice, clean interface.  Certainly much nicer and cleaner than what I experienced during the MySpace experiment.
2. I like that it plugs in with everything else that I use.  Brilliant.  “Favorite” a YouTube video?  It just shows up.  Bookmark a link in del.icio.us?  It shows up.  Twitter updates your status.  Flickr photos?  They’re there.  Write a blog post like this one right here?  Oh, it shows up, too.  This is Facebook’s most important feature.  You opt-in and it aggregates all ¹ of your online activity.
3. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough:  Facebook’s API has allowed developers to write little widgets that you can use for further aggregation and interaction.  E.g., My Flickr allows you to show more of your Flickr photos and to have them show up in your profile’s “Wall” ².  This is great inasmuch as it allows you to take that aggregation one step further.
4. That being said, Facebook’s UI seems to have buried the controls, preferences, and settings for these little apps in some deep, dark, esoteric, obfuscated little niche.  For example:
   1. I did my little search for “Flickr”, thinking that Facebook’s built-in integration would do what I needed it to ³ and then figured out that “My Flickr” was a separate app.  OK…
   2. …”installing” the app wasn’t intuitive.  I managed to become a “fan” of “My Flickr” before I found the link to install it.  OK…
   3. …there.  Installed.  Back to my Profile.
   4. Where is it?  There’s just a little line item that says I installed it.  But where are my photos?
   5. After some clicking around, I found “My Flickr” buried under a tab called “Boxes” ⁴.  Very well, let’s poke around on it and see what happens.  A half-hour of exploratory clicking later…
   6. …I discover some settings where I can finally (finally!) tell my Flickr account to authorize My Flickr to access it and feed images into the widget that is still buried somewhere under “Boxes” on Facebook.
   7. After about another half-hour of exploratory clicking, I manage to talk My Flickr into showing as a tab on the Wall ⁵ and as a little badge.
   8. But the badge is cutting off most of the pictures.
   9. I go to bed and resume in the morning.
   10. Two cups of coffee later:  I get it “good enough” and stop.

   One would imagine that installing and configuring the apps would be much simpler.  The explanations I’ve come up with so far:  (a) it’s intentionally hard ⁶ as an attempt to keep people from “MySpacing” their Facebook profiles or else (b) the developers intentionally sequestered the app configuration screen but under-estimated how often it would need to be accessed when the API was released.  Yes, I’m reaching a bit here.  But I think this is important; the way that Facebook aggregates content is huge and burying the functionality ⁷ that users need to control that aggregation seems…  Well, it seems foolish.

5. Word travels fast.  Like…  Really fast.  My profile wasn’t even 24 hours old before the “friend requests” started pouring in.  Lightning speed.  But I imagine that’s because Facebook has a pretty intelligent system going with how it recommends people to other people.  (“Oh hey!  You both went to SMCM!”)  And those little alerts, too…  “So-and-so is now friends with such-and-such.”
6. But (and this is the thing that always gets me) “friends” is…  Weird.  This has always been one of the things that has kept me away from Facebook.  I seemed to get an awful lot of “friend requests” from co-workers.  And to get them quickly.  And in the middle of the day ⁸.  Not that I’m not friendly with these folks.  But some of these “we” combinations haven’t exactly hung out.  Which…  OK, whatever.  Got to start somewhere, I suppose ⁹.
7. Also:  my new obsession is dissing the ads.  Thumbs down.  Uninteresting.  Thumbs down.  Other:  why are you advertising dating sites to someone marked as “married”?  Thumbs down.  Irrelevant.  Thumbs down.  Uninteresting.  Thumbs down.  Uninteresting… &c.

1. Well, not “all” but certainly all of your non-private, opted-in activity.[↩]
2. Sorry.  I really can’t take some of this nomenclature seriously.[↩]
3. It didn’t.[↩]
4. Because “boxes” is exactly what I think of when I think of “applications”.[↩]
5. This word is going to drive me bat-shit insane.[↩]
6. And I say this because each of the apps I’ve tried thus far have had similar installation/configuration difficulties.  Viz., it’s not just My Flickr.[↩]
7. I’m still not sure how I get to it.  It takes a lot of clicking though, I remember that much.[↩]
8. Come on people.[↩]
9. Which is, in itself, a whole weird super-structure of the linguistics of relationships.  Facebook and other “social networking sites” have this really binary system.  Flickr is the only one that I can think of that has any sort of gradation (i.e., Contact, Friend, Family; and no need for reciprocity).  I commented on this back in April during my review of Goodreads (though that was really more about its reciprocity requirements).  But anyway, my point being:  are you “friends” with a person if you’re “friendly” toward them?  Is “co-worker” enough of a relationship to qualify you as “friends” on a social networking site where there’s no other real alternative?  Would it make a difference (to someone like me) if I got a “connection request” instead of a “friend request”?  And then qualified the relationship as “professional but friendly”?  But I’ll stop with this.  Much smarter people than I have already tried (and failed?) to deconstruct this very issue.[↩]

About Rob Friesel

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