Random thoughts, ideas and other things!

Okay, hands up who knows exactly what Facebook provides nowadays, is it a tool for tagging photos of last night's drinking session and embarrassing your mates? Is it an application nightmare platform? Or is it a news aggregator... Well, all three apparently.

When Facebook started it had one real focus, connecting people. It started off with Harvard students. This was closely followed by opening up the site to other students and then ultimately, everyone. This, in my eyes, is when Facebook peaked. It was great; it had a nice clean simple interface and allowed me to add all my friends without the fear of being attacked by vampires or zombies.

Now a couple of years on and countless shuffles and redesigns, we're left with well, I'll be honest, a mess. To me it is pretending to be something that it's not.

Looking at my Facebook stream now, it makes me want to pull my hair out (if I had any). I subscribe to a couple of feeds from various news sites and the presentation sucks. Real estate, my friends. I'll get my ruler. Okay a random article posted of Facebook takes up 8.5cm, Twitter with the same news post? About 1.5cm. That's a difference of 7cm. All I want is a headline and a link to the article, not a synopsis, not a thumbnail of a random image from the news page and certainly not information of how many people like it. Who really cares anyway? All this mixed in with updates from my friends.

Don't get me wrong, Facebook has a lot going for it, but it needs to focus on the awesome things that it does offer, the photo tagging system (facial recognition?), improving the ability to find friends, old and new and well, the video uploader (which incidentally really needs fixing). As well as cleaning up the presentation of their streams.

What with the purchase of FriendFeed maybe things will get better. It's not the product per se, it's the people who power it. There are some innovated and highly skilled members from that team, hopefully now with them onboard things can only improve. Here's hoping.

Peace.