Some random thoughts

• I've biked three times to work this week, at 10 miles per one-way trip, which works out to 60 miles on my bike. That's 100 kilometres. That's pretty good, I think.
• I purged about 80 people from my Facebook friends list yesterday (which amounted to abut a third of my total friends). It's nothing personal. My newsfeed was becoming unmanageable and cluttered, filled with quizzes, contests, and other crap that I needed to cull. Not to mention Facebook seemed to promote my more obscure friends to my newsfeed page at the expense of, you know, my family. So I cut back on people, and now my newsfeed is far easier to follow.
  
• UFC's title history page has what I can only assume is a really bizarre error on it, and that's the declaration that Brock Lesnar beat Randy Couture "to become an interim UFC Heavyweight champion." It's compounded by the further declaration that at UFC 100, "The two interim Heavyweight title holders, Brock Lesnar and Frank Mir, will fight to determine the undisputed UFC heavyweight champion." Um, no. Randy and Brock were the actual UFC champions, not the interim champions. The UFC had a linear, undisputed champion for four years at that point, and the title only became split again when Randy walked out and Big Nog beat Tim Sylvia to become the interim champion. When Randy came back, he came back with THE BELT, not an interim championship. It's mindboggling that UFC would mess up their own title history like this. Not to mention, the page hasn't been updated in a few months.
  

Oops!

It turns out my live Twittering of the WWE HOF last night resulted in me basically spamming Facebook with status updates, because I have Twitter update my Facebook status. And that resulted in the news feed of all my friends being filled with nothing but my tweets.

Frankly, I blame Facebook for allowing this to happen.

The new Facebook is the old Twitter

It wasn't that long ago that Facebook overhauled its look, a move that predictably resulted in a ton of complaints. However, Facebook stuck it out, the complaining soon died, and life continued on in cyberspace.

Fast forward just a few months, and Twitter is all the rage, so Facebook decided to once again overhaul its look to make it more Twitter-like.

And I hate it with a passion. Hate, hate, hate. As in, "Thinking of shutting down my Facebook account" hate.

Yes, I know I've agreed with the sentiment that complaining about Facebook is one of those "first world" complaints that us comfortable North Americans make while real problems affecting real people remain ignored so we can complain about Facebook.

That said, the new Facebook format is terrible. It's Twitter. But we already have Twitter. Sure, Twitter is likely stealing traffic away from Facebook, but Twitter has, to my knowledge, no revenue model, and no revenue to speak of, so I have no idea how long Twitter is going to be around.

Facebook, meanwhile, has a devoted (read: fanatical to the point of being dangerous) legion of fans that feels very attached to the site and does not suffer changes gladly (witness the recent revolt over the Terms of Service). So why would Facebook tempt fate again by overhauling its look and risking alienating its users?

All the fun little intricacies that made Facebook "Facebook" are being removed - the status updates no longer default to that awkward third person, "Mike is ...". Awkward, but uniquely Facebook. The birthday calendar has vanished. I have this weird sidebar full of useless things my friends are doing.

In short, I'm not impressed.

And, no, I'm not really going to shut down my Facebook account. In about a week, I'll probably forget what the "old" Facebook even looked like - about the time that Facebook updates its look again and people start complaining about how much they miss the Twitter-like look.

But if I've learned anything from The Simpson's (and I'd like to think that I haven't, but that's a complete lie) it's that, "Rest assured, I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world."

Another "first world" complaint

The Internet was aghast this week at the new Facebook Terms of Service, which had a half-life of approximately 2 hours before Facebook sheepishly revoked them and decided that they didn't allegedly want the rights to your content in perpetuity anymore.

I mean, I had friends who were considering quitting Facebook at the thought that Facebook was going to own the rights to their photos forever.

Two thoughts on this:

1) This is a first world complaint. I'm sure the starving kids in Africa are really sympathetic here. Only we who have so much leisure time on our hands could be bothered to get upset over something that in the big picture is so meaningless.

2) Frankly, I'd like to see Facebook (or Google or any other big Internet company) try to win a PR battle by litigating some poor teenager over something like this. These kinds of terms of service would never stand up in a court of law, and I'm always amazed that people get so bent out of shape over it. See point 1.

I'm not complaining about the new Facebook, but ...

Within a day or so of Facebook permanently updating everyone to the "new Facebook," a friend of mine changed her status update to bemoan all of the people bemoaning the new Facebook.

She said that complaining about the new Facebook was such a "first world" complaint. In other words, only people like us in North America, full of affluence and without any real worries in life, could be bothered by a different interface on a piece of free software we are using.

Fair point.

However, my issue with the redesign is not a complaint per se about how it looks, but how it functions - or doesn't function.

Since the switchover, I have found Facebook to be very buggy in all sorts of ways. The news feeds are often 18 hours behind, or are weird mixed bag of brand-new updates plus stuff that is three days old. It doesn't update my Google Reader feed automatically anymore, forcing me to manually import stuff every once in a while. Stuff like that. And there seems to be no actual mechanism for giving feedback to Facebook in any way that results in a live human being responding and saying, "Yes, we're aware of that problem and we're trying to fix it."

Those would probably fall under the category of "first world" complaints as well, and I don't have any problem with that. Really, I don't care much at all how Facebook looks, but I do care about how it functions. And right now, it's not functioning very well.

Tonight's geeking-out roundup

Stories courtesy of Wired. Better headlines courtesy the former newspaper editor. (That would be me, by the way.)

Firefox goes on a memory diet.

Facebook gets a facelift.

Travelling Hawaii Facebook Group

As part of my social media education, I created a Facebook page tonight called Travelling Hawaii.

Feel free to become a fan. It's mostly for experimental purposes so I can figure out how to use Facebook better, but, hey, if it takes off, great!