Nine Things that Absolutely Suck about the Facebook Home Page

Maybe it’s because the site has evolved from being a college yearbook type application to being the most over-hyped website of the year.  Or maybe it’s the way it is because that’s exactly how Zuckerberg  wants it.  Whatever the reason, Facebook has a lot of suck – and they keep rolling more of it out.

I’m not going to include the most obvious things in this list like: “walled garden”, data lock-in, etc.  This will be more picky and will focus on the Home Page, and I’m sure some people will disagree with me that some of this stuff sucks.

1. The layout of the homepage can’t be adjusted.  Why does this suck?  Because I’m stuck with data being presented in the order they think is most important.  Which means that “pokes” (won’t even go over how lame pokes are) are right in my face while friends birthdays – one of the few useful features of Facebook are below the fold.  It means all my zombie invitations and ‘like’ invitations are at the top of the page.  Granted, they collapsed that list but it’s still too big.
2. Tied to number one, and maybe questionable for this list, but it really frustrates me that the walled garden doesn’t let me get the list of my friends birthdays out.  Since we already know it’s a walled garden, they could at least give me an option to have an email sent to me notifying me of whose birthdays are coming up.
3. No group feeds.  Apparently nothing goes on in all the groups I’ve joined.  Afterall, isn’t the home page supposed to let me know what’s going on in “my Facebook”?  What is the point of all these groups if I have to click through to each one in order to participate?  The homepage needs to have a tab that acts like an RSS aggregator for all the activity in the groups I’ve joined. 
4. Same thing with fan pages – what the hec is the point of becoming “a fan”???  Am I supposed to go click on all the fan pages I’ve added so I can see what’s up?  Again, this really calls for a tab on the homepage that acts like an RSS aggregator and lets me post on the wall right there in my homepage. 
5. Status Updates.  Updates from three of my friends are shown on my homepage but I have to click through to get them all.  Meanwhile, my news feed is littered with “Johny is now friends with someone you’ll never know” and a random sampling of friends status’s.  Adjusting the controls for the home page don’t seem to make this work right.  And while we’re on the topic of status updates – why can I get an RSS feed of my friends’ status, but not of MY status?  Guess they just need to rub that wall in your face and the fact that what you put in facebook is theirs, not yours.
6. Facebook forgets who I already said I know.  When I joined Facebook, I gave it access to several email accounts so it could find my friends who were already signed up.  Once it was done, they dumped that data apparently.  Why didn’t they keep it so they could notify me when somebody I know signs up?  Instead I have to keep giving them access to my email.  It would be pretty simple to just store all those emails in a table and have a simple join table that indicates who knows who. 
7. Why can’t I disallow poking?  And Superpoking.  And Ninja’ing.  And Zombie’ing.  I want an option to not allow these stupid, childish applications to spam me like crazy. 
8. The rest of this list is about the “People you may know” feature.  It sucks, a lot.  First and most obvious, it only shows you like 27 people.  There is no “next” button or “show me more”.  27 - that’s all the people you might know, except it’s not.  If you refresh it, about 2% of the people change.  So all you can do (once you’ve added all the easy pickings) is refresh and refresh until someone shows up that you know, and it’s extremely slow!  How stinkin’ hard would it have been to put a next button on there?
9. OK, so we’re stuck with a single page for the people you may know.  Why isn’t there a way to say “I don’t know this person”!?!?  Michael Arrington, Mark Cuban and Jason Calacanis show up over and over.  I’m not going to add them, but I keep having to filter them.  I’ve been tempted to add them just so the algorithm will take them out of my list. The biggest blah is that I’m friends with a lot of my cousins who go to BYU – all their friends at BYU dominate my list!  I don’t know their college friends and I never will – I want to be able to get them out of my might know list.

I hardly use Facebook anymore – there’s really nothing ever happening there.  My news feed on my homepage mostly just tells me that so and so became a fan of this or joined that group.  But, why are they even bothering?  It’s not like becoming a fan or joining a group actually gets you into the conversation – you still have to go to every group and fan page in order to see if maybe something happened that maybe you could participate in.   Facebook is kind of a ghost town for me, the crickets are getting loud.  It’s boring and if it didn’t suck so bad, they might have a chance of surviving even with a walled garden – but they don’t.  Facebook will die soon and all that data that we keep dumping in there will be lost to us – cause it ain’t ours, it’s theirs.