So, Facebook's new layout blows.

Before, everything was cleanly organized by the day it happened. You could look down someone's wall and see (albeit in reverse) a chronological order of events. Now I look at my wall and what do I see? Blog posts from here imported, now with the timestamp below instead of above just to make it harder to find, and random ejaculations of recent activity, completely ignoring the flow of time. I liked it better when you could see "ok, today he friended 3 people and sent one some bacon, yesterday he joined his martial arts dojo's group". Instead I see activity that happened after several blog posts being shown before them.

Some idiots don't see this as bad. If a service provider makes a habit of ignoring its users, they will become dissatisfied and leave for a service that caters more to their needs. Users of the internet are not merely dumb interfaces (different sense of the word dumb, not implying lack of intelligence but rather lack of automation), we don't exist to be advertised to, we don't accept everything thrust upon us with open arms.

Facebook's old layout was a lot cleaner too. Looking at my wall, is there any reason why I need to see my profile picture next to every single thing I post? It's at the top of the page, and larger. It doesn't need to be repeated smaller over 9000 times down the page. Having it there for other people that post on your wall or comment on your shit is nice, but there should be an option somewhere to control it.

If Facebook wants more money, and the way they make that money is through advertising (which is a shitty money-making model when 90% of the internet doesn't want to be advertised to, as evidenced by the popularity of ad blockers), then they should realize that advertising isn't merely a one-way company->consumer relationship. Without the consumer reacting favorably to the advertising, it doesn't work. If an ad gets the point across in a friendly, truthful manner, there will be a positive response to it. If it's so annoying that the user goes out of their way to block it, it's not going to work. Furthermore, companies should worry less about advertising and more about having a product that performs its function, doesn't break, and is affordable. If they ensure those three things, they would need a lot less advertising because, and I'm going out on a limb here, but humans are social creatures. When we like something, we want to tell all our friends about it. Those friends who are interested will try it out, and if they like it, they'll tell their friends. Word of mouth marketing has been so overlooked in recent decades that it's been rebranded "viral marketing" and labeled a "new" thing for gimmicky or catchy products.

Don't get me wrong, I still value functionality over form. But when the form obscures the functionality and limits its use, there's something wrong.

Advertising in general is another problem. Advertisers seem to think that consumers are required to view advertising, even if they don't want the product in question or wouldn't be influenced by an ad in the first place. So, what do those users do? They install ad blockers, they get PVRs with commercial skip, etc., so they can be in control of what they see. Advertising as a whole isn't bad, but it's become so prevalent and persistent in trying to set itself as the norm while at the same time the products being advertised are changing very little for the better. I said in the beginning of Google's text ads, that's the way to go. Text ads are way less intrusive than flashing images, fake OS windows that bounce and tell you that your PC needs to be optimized (and lol who uses their OS' default theme anyway?), flash ads that use an actionscript loophole to open popups that popup blockers didn't start blocking until recently, etc., Text ads are just as functional as image ads without being annoying: they get the word out and provide a relevant link for the interested to peruse. Plus, it's a lot less bandwidth-intensive to serve text ads. Just sayin'.

When a community is forced to install extra software to block what they don't want to see because it's everywhere, something's wrong. Advertisers whine about ad blockers potentially bankrupting companies, but they're missing the point. The users who install ad blockers are the very same users that wouldn't have clicked on the ads in the first place. They see no need to have something on their screen that's of no use to them, so they remove it with an ad blocker. It's not causing money loss, rather, it's just not causing money gain. Typical corporate greed ignoring the neutral. They'll still get money, just less of it (not like they need any more anyway, they're fucking hoarding it all. After all, it was corporate greed that drove us into this recession in the first place). The money they do get will come from customers who are loyal and thus will be repeat customers and continue giving them money for their product.

Here's an idea for the companies: Pay your executives less and put that excess money into R&D. Seriously. Once you start making the boatloads of extra money that having a quality product gets you, give your grunt workers a raise since they're the ones doing the hard work making the stuff. Your executives with two mansions in each US time zone whose private chefs light their grills with $100 bills (lol I made a rhyme) and don't think about giving any of it back to the workers that make their shit and therefore made them rich in the first place already have enough money.

Now back to Facebook, since I got side-tracked on the advertising side-rant. I'm not a part of the social networking generation. I'm new to this stuff. How I networked socially before all this social networking site bullshit came about was an amalgam of message boards, IRC chats, IMs, and email. It worked, and still does to this day. Why change what works? Well, they wanted to integrate it all together. I guess that makes sense, but all the current implementations thereof are crap. All the AJAX bloat that comes hand in hand with it that causes a page to use more memory and cpu to be rendered just so it can sit in the background and let you chat with your friends using a javascript monstrosity that doesn't have nearly the feature set of IRC definitely doesn't help. I might just be an old geezer here but I don't see social networking as something that's necessary. I'm taking part in it anyway for a variety of reasons I'll go into at a later date.

I have great privacy concerns with all this social networking. These sites are basically trying to entice their users into posting all their personal information, no matter how private, just so they can keep track of it. What legitimate purpose does that serve? Sure, it's nice to be able to look at a friend's profile and see their phone number, but why call them when you could just talk to them on the internet?

Some have said that Facebook is too restrictive with users' expression of themselves. There is a sizable group that wants it to become another Myspace, i.e. every aspect of the page is customizable so therefore there's an animated gif background, text you can't read because of the animated gif background, music you don't like on autoplay, javascript that completely re-does the navigation so you're not completely sure how to see some people's information or get to some parts of their profile, the list goes on. Facebook is fine in that respect. It doesn't need that amount of customizability. That level of customizability is a bad thing. It's why Myspace has the reputation of being a bunch of kids who don't fully understand everything but think it's neato and copy off of everyone else so that other people will perceive them as "cool". A standardized layout that doesn't change from page to page gives off a much cleaner, more professional vibe than a layout that completely changes from page to page and is hardly ever usable.

Imagine if your local newspaper (or your favorite magazine, or some other print media you read regularly) allowed all of their writers to specify their own colors and visual styles for their articles. The publication would be a mess and nobody would buy it. Web sites are the same way. When you're using some service on the internet, you should have to use their layout because it's how they ensure that their functionality is best used. If you abuse a profile exploit to paste CSS and Javascript in a profile field to completely redo the page's layout, they lose their ability to easily ensure that their service is easy to use and friendly to all users. If you want personalization, well, how about the content? That's what the internet is about. Content. Not about pretty colors, background music on autoplay, having 5 million images on one page, etc. Just make sure that the content you post on your profile is reasonably descriptive of whatever side of you that you'd like to show on the internet and there's your personalization.

Now it's partially Myspace's fault, since they allow HTML in profile fields and don't sanitize it in any way to restrict it down to just formatting tags. But they haven't done anything about it.

Now excuse me. I'm going to go back to my IRC chats or browse some (other) websites or something.