amanda_lodden

An Open Letter To Facebook:

Please stop trying to think for me.

I can live with the new layouts every other month. This time you
moved my one-click bookmarks to the applications I am sadly addicted
to, but I know how to use the Bookmarks feature of my browser, so I
can work around you. It's annoying that now I have to click through
several sub-menus to revoke an application's ability to automatically
post things to my wall without asking me, but the ability is still
there, so it's fine. (Take that ability away and I will stop using
Facebook apps, at which point I will switch over to Tweetdeck to keep
track of status updates and stop going to your site entirely.)

But I can't abide by your decision to stop showing me all of the
status updates even after I've jumped through your hoops to get to
whatever you're calling the "Live Feed" now. (For that matter, what
the hell were you thinking with the "News Feed" option at all?) I
don't know what criteria you're using to filter out my friends, but
it's not the same criteria I use, so you need to stop it. If I don't
want to hear from someone, I'll use the "Hide" feature and get rid of
them myself. I find it tremendously annoying that I have to use my
RSS feed of status updates to double-check what you've already claimed
to have shown me. I find it equally annoying that I can't use that
RSS feed to bypass you entirely, because you won't put the fact that
someone uploaded a photo or shared a link (and multi-paragraph
diatribe about the link) into the RSS feed.

I know, I know, all the cool technology is doing it. I hate them for
it, too. I don't mind it when you guys add in methods for me to tell
you how to think for me-- I LIKE that my car uses power steering to
help me turn without wrenching my shoulders every time, but the day my
car starts deciding to turn whether I tell it to or not is the day I
start walking everywhere. I'm not 100% fond of spam filters either,
since every so often I find myself scrolling through page after page
of spam to find the one false positive that contains the message I've
been waiting for and cursing the sender for forgetting about... but
given that the alternative is (*pauses to check her spam folder*) 200
extra spam messages per day, I've grudgingly given in on that. But it
doesn't mean I like it.