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Apr 15

FB's Software Doesn't Seem Worth Billions

wtf?, privacy, usability

Not, of course, that their billion-dollar IPO filing is solely based on the quality and value of their software.

(warning: usability rant.)

I recently re-joined Facebook after leaving two years ago. I left at the time out of frustration with their frequent privacy stumbling. The days of proudly saying, "I'm not on Facebook, I'm a privacy researcher." have ended for me; I can't work in privacy research and not know how almost a billion Earthlings interact.

My return is not without some gnashing of teeth. I don't get Facebook's software... the freakin' iOS client keeps logging me out every 5 minutes. Maybe that's not a bad thing; "You've been dicking around with FB for 5 minutes... that's too long." I uninstalled and reinstalled, changed my FB password and all that; no dice.

As for the web experience: I can't seem to figure out how to "turn on" Timeline; maybe it takes a while for Timeline to activate for new accounts? If so, it would be awesome if their Help docs stated that so I don't spend 30 minutes trying to figure out the source of the problem ("it's not you, it's me"). Plus, there are privacy settings everywhere (not just in "privacy settings" where you'd expect them, but also in "account settings" and, as was relevant in this case, in "Edit Profile"); so ubiquitous that I didn't even notice that I was publicly sharing my birthdate (or what I told FB it was) until a friend told me. And I have three old friend requests in "Find Friends" that won't go away or hide themselves; that just seems broke.

Neither Safari or Chrome on the Mac seem to play well with FB; lots of the "notifications" content goes missing or appears stale, and it can take 30-45 minutes for a notification to appear in the web client (after it shows up via email).

I can't help but think there's some cruft lying around on the server-side of FB from my old account (although that's probably not it as I used a berkeley.edu address for that one and this one is gmail.com).

Anyway, point is: this is not the software experience I expect from the latest and greatest.

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