Ticker.

I’ve been writing some pretty heavy blog entries this week. I guess it’s reflective of the mood I’ve been in. There is one thing that has really been bugging me that I haven’t talked about yet, though. I need to get it off my chest.

What the hell has happened to Facebook?

I logged in early this other morning and things were different. My chronologically sorted timeline was gone and replaced with “Top Stories”, items that someone deemed were important to me. The birthday list that I review everyday had been shoved down to the bottom of the page and replaced with a scrolling, blob of uninteresting drivel that I couldn’t move and couldn’t delete. If I scrolled the page, that blob of uninteresting drivel remained, slowly recounting what my friends were doing to other people that I don’t know. “Mandy likes unicorns.” “Bobby responded to Edgar’s post.” Who the hell is Edgar?

As a web designer by trade, that unmovable blob of uninteresting drivel’s presence irks the hell out of me. The fact that it’s just shoved there and that everything scrolls around it is just wrong. Bad, bad design. It’s like a fly landed on the screen and started pooping. Hate it.

I know that I’m getting rather on in my years but I thought that a timeline was suppose to be presented chronologically? Why is Facebook trying to tell me that my friends losing at Mafia Wars (what the hell is that?) is akin to a newspaper story? If I wanted to read a newspaper I’d buy one. If people are telling stories then they need a life and to get out of the house more. I’m looking for a chronological view of what’s going on in the people I’ve selected to care about lives.

Honestly, I want to dump Facebook completely. It’s reminding me more and more of MySpace and the reason I left MySpace is because it looked like someone was serving shit on a stick. Facebook is becoming awful. I think the ONLY thing that’s keeping a good chunk of the people engaged in the service is the fact that they and millions of their friends and family are already on there.

Sorry, I’ve never liked a hostage situation and I’ve never liked being told what to do. I might still bag the Facebook thing completely and do something drastic like write a letter or dial a phone. Hell, I might just hang out on Skype and talk to people face to face and leave me witty one-liners to Twitter. And unless someone invents a solid way to import my contact lists from Facebook to Google+ and a lot of people follow along with the conductor, Google+ ain’t gonna do much for me. I know it’s in beta but I’ve seen people take less time to build a rocket to get to the moon. (I don’t know why I selected that outdated metaphor but I did.)

To sum it all up: Facebook sucks and it’s time to Dial-A-Visit. One ringy dingy.