one man's journey into creating gibblybits

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Here's how Facebook sucks

OK, I while back I tried to get on the Facebook train. Really, I did. Unfortunately I had two problems:

1) Facebook assumes you have a university email at every school you've ever attended. Not so. My old film school, Watkins, I'm sure does have email now. However, back when I attended, bachelor accreditation was still pending, the school was in an old Woolworth's in downtown Nashville, etc. This was just before the first dotcom boom! Facebook, you're all "collegey" so don't say you never heard when you assume, you make an ass of u and me. That was lame, I know. But forcing me to use an email that never existed? Pretty lame.

2) OK, given this little "problem" when I signed up I was forced to use my ITT Tech email (where I worked as an instructor at the time). Well, now it looks like I actually graduated from ITT, and my "network" is one of our over 60 campuses, somewhere in Texas or something. WHA? That's just silly. So I'm going to change this, but it's a crappy way to start.

My final issue is still happening, and I've no idea how to fix it. My real alma mater is the University of Tennesee, right here in Knoxville. However, searching for any combination of UT, University of Tennesee, Knoxville, etc. yields NO results. Really? Gosh Facebook, hard to imagine that with 26,000 students flowing through the school multiplied by the number of years I was there, added to the number of years since THERE HAVE NEVER BEEN ANY UT GRADS SMART ENOUGH TO FIGURE OUT YOUR STUPID WEBSITE?

No, I know you can't find them. Your search sucks. Your feeble attempts at folksonomy suck. It's easier to find my friends on MySpace, and MySpace has all the graceful functionality of a Soviet-era milking machine. And when you give me the option to search within results when there were no results? That makes me think you hired a guy that couldn't cut it at Microsoft because MSN Search was just "too hard to make work."

So, you know where my school is? Under the Tennessee network! Of course, how stupid of me. Despite the fact that more and more non-college students are using Facebook, they still seem to think ONLY college kids are using the damn thing.

But the bottom line is, my alma mater, the school I got my fancy bachelor's at, I can't join the network. No Tennessee for me! No, because I haven't fired up a VAX system in over 10 years, nor have I checked my @utk.edu account in a decade, I will never be able to join... That's completely idiotic, and that's why you will rarely find me doing anything on Facebook. When you kill the primary use of your website and treat your users like interlopers, you pretty much suck from head to toe.

3 comments:

kingkool68 said...

Did you try importing your Gmail contacts into Facebook and searching for friends that way? It is the way to go.

As for your school problem, you're right, that is a kludgey problem. But eventually you old guys who never had e-mail in college will wither up and move on leaving the young and fertile to dominate the digital social landscape. Come on don't you like the applications?

shlep said...

Hey Victor:

What's even perhaps funnier is that this page was one of my first hits when I typed "itt knoxville sucks" into Google.

This is Greg, by the by...used to teach at the K-Town ITT around the same time you did. I'm in Ohio trying to get my own gig started doing web page search optimization, and whilst goofing around with search terms, I thought I'd try variations of terms used by people who like to totally bag on ITT (no shortage there, to be sure). Always good for a laugh...well, until my own name comes up. :)

Hope you're still enjoying your Apple-related pursuits as much now as you did when last I saw ya.

--Greg

Bryan said...

For the most part, I like facebook. I don't know much about web design for functionality, but I do know that i signed up 4 days ago and 3 of the past 4 nights I have spent talking on the phone to friends i haven't talked to in over 10 years. I do agree that facebook search REALLY sucks. And they could improve the types of associations you have. For instance I was in the Air Force, but I didn't know everyone in the Air Force. I really only had a good chance to know people I was stationed with. I provided those locations, but I still get the entire Air Force. Feel sorry for people who worked at Wal Mart. They probably get half the population of the earth suggested as friends.

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