Facebook and Me: "It's Complicated"

OK, Facebook, you have just about made me divorce myself from you once and for all.

It's bad enough that I can't read my "most recent", from EVERYONE (not just the ones YOU think I care the most about), in ORDER. But now – oh, the worst of all – you have somehow modified which items send me automatic emails to my “real” email when people comment or “Like” threads in which I have participated.

I now have to get into your stupid ass user-hostile application to call up all my notifications for the past however many hours since I have last been on, and follow up with each item from there. And that doesn’t even TELL me about all the many threads from other friends in which I have participated and might want to continue the discussion!!!

And please, oh, please. Do NOT cause my mouse “hovering” (mostly accidentally in my case) to bring up a whole bunch of other moving or popping crap in my right margin. The world already moves way too fast for this old woman. I don’t need any additional animations, graphics, flashing stuff, noise or anything else out of my computer. It is here TO SERVE ME, not vice versa. I choose what I hear (lots of mute use) and see (yes, I have actually put a yellow sticky over a place on a screen which insisted on blinking during an online game I used to play).

My hearing is still pretty good, but I do like to control the volume on my computer, and I do so way more often than your advertisers would like. Mostly, I mute stuff that’s too loud.

My vision, alas, is not so good, and never has been. I wore glasses for distance (astigmatism) from about the age of twelve, and now, in my (substantially) post-age-40 reality, the near vision is becoming equally bad. Middle range is my worst, between contact lenses (multi-focals primarily for my near-sightedness) and glasses (single strength for my distance vision). Therefore, I need to be able to control size of things like fonts and game pieces whenever possible. You would be amazed at the lengths I go to so that I can read and see clearly what’s on my screen.

I like to look at one thing at a time – I am not 20 anymore and do not need the very best resolution so that I can have 65 things on my screen simultaneously. I have a pretty large monitor, but I need to be able to read the text, and most of it is WAY too small, partly due to the need to cram infinite amounts of advertising (flashing and making noise) onto your “free” application.

I have over 190 Facebook friends, about whom I genuinely care. The last thing in the world that I need now is for some damn computer program to help me to accidentally be rude to them, or seem to ignore them.

I know, I know… you have all kinds of wonderful documentation online to explain to idiot old users like me exactly how to change all my settings to get back whatever emails I want, or whatever. But I have two problems with that. First, in your infinite corporate youth, I find that a lot of your documentation is simply not kept up to date, and the Help items often refer to a prior version of Facebook – you know, the way I used to LIKE it. Secondly, it’s just too damn much work.

So here’s the thing. I have friends trying to convert me to Google Plus, saying it’s much better. Now, granted, these friends are much younger than I, and may not have some of the same issues that I have about wanting things slower and one at a time, but at this point, I am tempted.

And then I have other friends who are either NOT on Facebook at all or who are barely there (new to Facebook). These friends are mostly older than I and less tech-savvy, and they like things even slower and simpler than I. They send me emails or they read my Facebook feed, but that’s about all they choose to do. And that’s fine. If I choose to divorce Facebook, though, I need to find a way to keep in touch with all of THOSE friends.

I’m beginning to think that I just need to bite the bullet and send one last FB Message to every one of my FB Friends, and include in that message MY EMAIL ADDRESS. Therefore, if they want to communicate with me, they can type and send an old-fashioned email directly to me without your damn application deciding what I should see and should not see. (Of course, there is a whole other issue I have with my Yahoo mail related to what is Spam and what is not Spam, not to mention the animated commercials that take away my use of the the right side of each screen and occasionally lock the entire application – but that’s not YOUR problem.)

In closing, Facebook, old friend, you need to adapt or you will lose MY friendship. Here are two suggestions.

1. Stop trying to be all things to all young people. You are NOT Google Plus; you might be a bad imitation at best and a broken wanna-be at worst. I know that software development is a discipline (repeat after me, kids: “di-si-plin” DISCIPLINE) and the more quick fixes you throw at it to be like someone else, the more broken and screwed up it will get. I know what I’m talking about here; I am, after all, an old mainframe developer myself. As a Murphy’s Law poster I owned put it beautifully, “If builders built buildings the way programmers build systems, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization”.

2. Stop doing things to piss off a large number of your current demographic. Like I said before, you are NOT Google Plus. However, you do have many older people who have found you and obviously like you better than MySpace for what they want to do. Why not cultivate that demographic and slow it down a bit? Oh, I know why – cause it’s not cool to be old. Old people have problems with their bodies and their minds and worst of all, they die. Well, guess what, Einstein. You kids are gonna get old and die someday too. It’s called life. And when you get a little bit closer to that, after some number of years of experience, you might just begin to understand what I am trying to say here.