I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  I don’t get what is so fantastic about Facebook. I’ve not bothered looking at my page for a long time, but today received an invite from a colleague to have a look at his page.  Here’s where the experience get weird.

I clicked on the link in my colleague’s email.  The email was clearly generated by Facebook.  It took me to his page and added a message saying “If you already have a Facebook login, please log in” or some such.  So I logged in.  And I now see MY page.  No mention of my colleague. So I go back to the email link and click it again.  It opens another copy of MY page.  Huh?

So I give up on this and note what seems to have changed on my page.  I see a short message saying “2 updates”, so I click it.  Whereupon I am shown ONE update.  Huh?

So I see, on the right, the name of one of my contacts with a (2) after it.  I click on the name and it shows me two updates finally.  I also notice at this point that the first update I had previously seen was, in fact, only a summary of the first update.  Now I see both in full.  Huh?

Now, I am not personally a user of eBay but my wife is.  So I have to help her figure out stuff there quite often too.  She likes to refer to their “glitch of the week” as, through repeated use she notes altered behaviours, frequently making certain tasks impossible.  Every time they fix something, a new glitch appears to take its place.

On one occasion we were looking for a link that was clearly described in the help text.  It turns out that the link we needed was called something completely different and was not in the place they described it to be and only appeared under certain conditions!

Facebook only succeeds because of its ‘now’ factor.  I will keep my profile because it has actually proven a useful contact medium.  However I will keep tabs on it via the RSS feed and not that misguided interface. eBay succeeds because people make cash and save cash.  Money makes the world go round.  And yes, I’ve resurrected the C.R.A.P. category for this post.