Leaving Facebook for Google+ (And why Facebook is “Broken”)

September 23, 2011 Chilling_Silence Personal Rantings

Cross-posted to Google+: https://plus.google.com/107713928526758699946/posts/JGUnGXWGYsr
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So I thought considering I’ve recently switched to using Google+ as my primary social network that I’d try using it as a blogging system as well. Makes sense seeing as most of the time my blogs are just rather long status updates, or tutorials on things.

So, I’ve been angry with Facebook for quite a while now, in the literal sense of the word. I’ll start by explaining that my best mate started dating this girl at the beginning of the year (New years I think). Naturally within a month, I’d added her on Facebook. Because of her privacy settings, I could see everything she had previously posted as soon as I requested to be her friend, even though she didn’t “approve” me for another month or so. I just couldn’t reply.
That’s fine.

…but then it’d been a few months and I’d not seen a single post from her. I have less than the “500 friend threshold” that Facebook limits you to, in terms of being able to see updates from your friends in your News Feed, so the theory is that unless I block somebody, I should see 100% everything. But I don’t.
My friend was telling me about how his girlfriend had posted something, and how he replied, and there was a bit of banter going on back and forth between them the night before. That was odd, considering that night I basically spent on Facebook while doing some web design. I saw everything on Facebook. I jumped on quickly and checked, and sure enough, I checked through the previous 48 hours worth of posts, and it wasn’t there. I went to my mates girlfriends Facebook Profile page, and sure enough, he was telling the truth!
It was simply not there in my news feed.

So I logged a bug.

Didn’t hear anything back.

Same deal a month later, I noticed it with my brother-in-law. Logged another bug. They basically came back and told me “Check and make sure they’re not blocked, and that you’ve got the max friends set to 500, and it’ll work”. I went back to them and said “He’s not blocked, and I have 300-400 friends. Well under the limit”. They basically denied all responsibility saying it was my issue.
Whatever, losers.

Then about 2 months ago I noticed that I’m now seeing things my friend say to other “groups” that I’m not a member of. One of them is involved in a Uni group, another one in some political movement group. Another in some enthusiast / hobby group. I don’t care about either of those, and some nights I get more of those than actual legit “stuff”

So now I know they’re not showing me things that I want, and showing me things I dont want. Not impressed…

It then got real bad when I was contributing with The Edges recent promotion “Lost in a Box” (See www.lostinabox.co.nz ). They have one of those ‘shoutbox’ style widgets that they use to communicate with the people stuck in the box, as well as all the other people viewing the cameras. I setup a fan-site, which was cool, and I was trying to tell other people about it using this shoutbox widget on the website, but my messages were only being seen by a few people. I tried both including the “Post to my Facebook Feed” option, and without it.
Nothing.

I logged in to Kristys PC (My wife), right next to me. Couldn’t see either comment with or without the “Post to my Facebook” option ticked.
Jumped on our guest PC which has no Facebook account. Tried again. Still couldn’t see anything.
However, I know it was going through because I had two people respond to me. So after posting around 20 messages, I had two replies.

This was 3 weeks ago.
By now, I was really angry with Facebook. So I jumped on another browser on my PC, went through the signup with an alternative email address on Facebook, and made another new account.
I went through and mirrored all my privacy settings 100%, just to make sure I wasn’t being a moron. Then I jumped on The Edge website again (So this is about 10 minutes later since my previous tests) and made a test post under this new account.

Immediately, I saw that post on my other browser as my “main self”, I saw it on our Guest PC which had no Facebook account logged in, and I also saw it on my wifes’ PC. I also had the people inside the box see it and they thought it was cool, and I had around about a dozen replies in this shoutbox widget to my one single message that mentioned this website I had setup.
Basically, this new account worked, whereas my account didn’t. My settings were identical in terms of Privacy, so why could only some people see what I had been saying? None of the people were people I knew that replied in this shoutbox widget.

Something’s wrong, really wrong, and basically Facebook don’t care enough to fix it

Then we get to the changes which happened in the last 48 hours.

So picture me, already pissed off enough coz I know that Facebook aren’t showing me everything that I want to see (When I’m supposed to see everything from every single one of my 380-odd friends). NOW, they have a good excuse not to show me things, but it gets worse, I now see everything that my friends do.

This is bad in a few ways:

1) It’s a bit of a privacy issue. Granted it’s theoretically possible for me to actually go into peoples walls and see what they’ve done for the most part, but it’s not right there in front of your friends all the time. If I’m trolling on a group page, why would my friends care if they’re not in that group? If it’s with a friend we both have in-common, then that might be a different story, but for the better part it’s not. Where’s my option to turn this off so my stuff isn’t there in front of everybody? I can turn off my friends things, one by one, so I don’t see them. But that’s the wrong way, it should be the other way around.

2) I don’t actually care. I don’t want to see everything my friends are doing with people I don’t know. If I know them, then maybe, coz they could say something like “Hey are you going to see Basshunter in concert this Saturday?” so I could join in and say “Hey yeah I’m going!”, that’s different, but when it’s with people I don’t actually know, usually about things I have no knowledge of, will never attend, and don’t actually care about, then I don’t wanna see it!

So as you can tell, I’m upset, I don’t like Facebook, I think it’s going to get worse with this ‘Timeline’, and I’m going to be using Google+ as my primary social network from now.
It took me 2 years to switch to Facebook from Bebo (I downloaded my entire account history a few months back and saw the time between my first 5 posts was 2 years), but I did it. Same for when everybody left MySpace for Bebo prior to that. It took a while, but it happened. Now it’s going to happen with Facebook too.

I’ve really begun to notice a whole lot of “cool” things about Google+, more every day, including things as I write this post. So here, I’ll list them:
1) When sharing or mentioning links, you have control over if it displays a ‘summary’ of the page (A brief snippet), a preview picture, or even the link at the bottom of the post entirely. You can have a combination of preview picture or snippet, or neither, or just one, whatever. It’s cool, it’s just one nice little extra good feature
2) There’s no limit to the amount of images I can upload. Choice, I can upload everything I take a photo of on my phone, and it’s a backup! AWESOME!
3) Instant Upload — I have 1GB a month on my phone. I don’t take a lot of photos, but when I take it and I wanna share it, I want it to be easy. It’s cool coz now lets say I’m at the Zoo taking photos of Giraffes from my Cellphone. Some are blurry and dont look good, so I won’t share those, but by the time I get in to either my phone or my Desktop PC, or my Android Tablet, the photos are all already uploaded so I can just tick the ones I wanna share, who I wanna share them with, and I’m done! It’s fast, easy, and I love it!
4) I’m not bombared with stupid “…likes the awkward moment when (insert not really awkward moment)”. If you wanna +1 something, then you can +1 it, and I don’t care coz I won’t see it, unless you specifically “share” it. If you start mass-sharing things, then I’ll happily just block you.
5) Spam. Yeah it happens here, but the controls are so much easier, as well as reporting spam, even on a per-comment basis.
6) Circles, they’re easy as to setup, they’re flexible (You can be in multiple circles, for example your “workmates” can also be in your “mountain biking buddies” group). If you don’t want that control, then cool, lump everyone into a single group and call it “everyone”. Yeah I’ve already pulled up people for trolling on this, like Mauricio Freitas (Yup, he tried trolling on his first day on G+, the cheeky sod got pulled up on it and threw a sookie lala and blocked me :: http://min.us/lUMIkzwpaCnPq ). Granted Circles are not for everybody, but that’s cool, if it’s too much work for you then that’s fine, you’re lucky because Google cares enough that you don’t have to put people in individual circles.
7) Fine-grained profile / privacy controls. If I only want my family to see my cellphone number, then choice, it’s dead easy. Up until recently, the Facebook controls have been terrible, and they still leave a lot to be desired in a lot of ways. In Google+, its easy to edit your profile and who will see it. Dead easy!

…and that’s only the beginning!

So yeah, I reckon Facebook is going downhill. It’s not going to disappear overnight, but Google+ is certainly where it’s at. It takes a lot to convince people to jump ship on social networking fronts (I know, I’ve done it twice before this with Bebo and with Facebook), but I think it’s worth it. As I said, it took two years for me to leave Bebo for Facebook, but somebody had to sign up first, someone has to be the “first out of your friends”, why not make that somebody you? Eventually, people will start to join, you’ll see πŸ™‚

Circles, facebook, Google, Mauricio Freitas, News Feed,


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