Annoying TIMELINE

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, at the press conference of FB's newest feature, TIMELINE

TIMELINE, without any doubt, is one of the most ridiculous features ever introduced by Facebook.

I don't understand why the team bothered to invent it in the first place, aside from its tacky and disastrous concept, none of its so-called "social enhancement ideas" captured everyone's fantasy.

The trouble with this TIMELINE feature is the annoying appearance of the page, very cluttered and painfully messy. It feels like my backyard had been wrecked by whatever tempest. With huge images in two columns, annoying side-by-side flashing of images, too much revelation of users' private lives, shuffling of wall posts like deck of cards, bursting of nonsense updates as if someone is dying to know of our whereabouts and what we had eaten during dinner, Facebook beginning to look like a hopeless paparazzi making users' lives very miserable and haunted.

Don't get me wrong but I'm not the only one who extremely detested this feature anyway. According to a poll conducted by a security firm Sophos, about half of the registered users of Facebook are not happy with this latest feature, scrapbook-format. People can easily navigate through the profile page with everything we've posted, from our likes, comments, photos, sentiments, etcetera. With this TIMELINE feature, the big issue on privacy again is in question.

Privacy concerns continue to rock Facebook in recent years, with more and more users from the US and Europe became disillusioned and left this social networking site, I began to ponder whether it's time for me to disembark and move elsewhere. 

This new TIMELINE feature of Facebook is only applicable to users who love to "socialize", fond to share updates about their private lives, where they are going, what they are up to and all those itchy-bitchy stuff. Unfortunately, I find it very creepy to update people with what I'm cringing at the moment, so it's not applicable to me. Gosh, so absurd!

Sure, there are people who love it and wonder why on earth I still fidget in the messy world of FB when I could have all the freedom to leave the site. Oh well, not now. My reason of sticking at FB is purely "business" and I mean real business. I know that FB ranks higher in search engines, its traffic density is massive, so I could reap plenty of benefits. 

I have fan pages for my blogs and home business site, I have plenty of blogs to promote and I could get tons of instant traffic from it. For someone like me who is earning extra income online, Facebook is a huge help. When I checked my blog traffic statistic, Facebook is the number one referral site, thus, it's a bad decision to quit FB right now.

But despite the good benefits I gained from using FB, I found TIMELINE deliberately irritating and annoying and hoping against hope Mark Zuckerberg could make up his mind to allow users to make an option to use the TIMELINE profile or not or at least add a "revert-back-to-old-profile page" button. So now I am suggesting. LOL!

With more users treat FB as a forum board, a hang out, a shoulder to cry on, a sound-proof glass, a confession booth and God knows what else, early users (I became a facebook member in 2007) are looking elsewhere to hang out. So hopefully, FB team will take time to listen to users' demand to sustain the fascination and loyalty.

Okay, since there's no room for hard-headed users like me to resist this craziest feature of FB, I am contemplating now what image to put on the "cover" of my page without crossing the line of being too attention seeker.

Post a Comment

0 Comments