An Open Letter, Because Facebook Is Broken

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, of the Facebook Zuckerbergs:

I would tell you this over Facebook chat, but it doesn’t fucking work!

I’m pretty sure the chat embedded in online Wheel of Fortune games that I played 10 years ago worked more efficiently and was more enjoyable to use.

You keep redesigning Facebook (moving shit around), but you can’t seem to make it work technically.

I KNOW you have a BlackBerry*, which means you probably exclusively use BBM to talk to your friends, but have you tried your website’s chat feature lately?

I’ve heard that you are socially awkward**, but that doesn’t mean your product needs to promote social awkwardness.

When I use a chat client that doesn’t work properly, I put myself at risk for social faux pas – what if a message doesn’t send right away then finally appears at an inappropriate time? What if I am signed out of chat when someone just asked me an important question or made a risky comment?

Want to hear me rant some more? Just follow me on Twitter.

@ChrisSerico I agree, but FB really needs to step up its chat feature – Google is way better at that. I’ve been whining about it forevs.

@arisemedia Exactly. Other people have told me, “Well, just use Gchat.” But everyone is right there on FB!!

@philtoronto I hate using it, but some of my friends refuse to use Gchat and just have to use FB chat – I don’t understand it!

Seriously, Mark, you need to figure this shit out. Google is trying to move in on your territory with Buzz, and, I’m not gonna lie, Gchat is my chat client of choice.

However, not all my friends use Gchat. Almost ALL of my friends use Facebook. Do you see the possibilities here?

Instead of dazzling me, you leave me with a laundry list of complaints:

Chats won’t send until a few seconds after I type them.

In Firefox, if I have Facebook chat open in one of multiple tabs, I will have trouble switching from tab to tab. I will also have trouble typing in other tabs (e-mail, Google Docs, Wordpress posts). My cursor will simply freeze or disappear.

I can’t seem to type when the other person is typing.

Sometimes, my messages are sent more than once, or I will see something the other person sent more than once.

If I happen to refresh the Facebook home page because the news feed doesn’t automatically refresh (WTF?!), I sometimes get logged out of chat, or the chat client disappears completely. A few times, I have had to log out and log in to get it to work again.

I won’t even attempt to talk to more than one person because everything just freezes – I can’t type efficiently, and it’s so annoying that I just want to leave Facebook completely.

You don’t want people to leave your website! You make money from ads! That people are supposed to click!

I know that Facebook is a free service, and many people will overlook annoyances when something is “free”. However, Twitter user @primatage doesn’t think we should stand for it, and neither do I:

I can’t stand it when people defend something like Facebook just because it’s “free”

@primatage Agreed! It’s not even free because you’re paying by looking at ads!

@ryssiebee exactly, and i don’t think that most of them realize that. they also use our information to market to advertisers

Please, I only write because I care. Now don’t let me down!

Love,

Laryssa

*”I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.”

**”So much, then, for the cathartic communitarian promise of social media, with its supposedly magical ability to bring people together and socialise even somebody as clinically awkward and impassive as Mark Zuckerberg.”

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

Tagged as: facebook, social networking