A Red-Letter Day

I am proud to say that my Facebook addiction has finally been broken. How did I manage? Facebook was kind enough to make sure that there was nothing in its new layout worth being addicted to.

Facebook's previous layout, while creepy at first, turned out to be a jewel. I told Facebook who I really wanted to hear about, as well as who's "Bra and Panties Party" pictures I did not want to see, and Facebook took care of the rest. It filled my Stalkerfeed up with information about people I wanted to know about, and since they're usually not on Facebook, it aggregated it with filler information about people I'm sorta indifferent about. It was a nice setup; I could log on, and after a quick rundown of the Stalkerfeed, I was pretty updated on a good number of people... And I took advantage of this. A lot.

But no, Mr. Zuckerberg couldn't keep a good thing. He apparently has some form of Twitter envy going on here, because when I first logged into the new layout, I thought I accidentally pulled up Twitter. "What are you doing?" asks Twitter. "I don't care," says Justin.

This bombardment of "real-time" information is overwhelming, especially considering it's dominated by a handful of people who upload their entire lives to Facebook... Plus, they're people I don't care about. The "I like these people" filter is totally absent, and instead I get to see 6 stories for the photo album you just uploaded, along with gems such as "...is sitting in anthro eating hot fries" or "...needs a haircut." Yes, thank you Facebook. I wanted to know that. Meanwhile, this junk is pushing information about the few people I would want to hear about off the bottom of the feed. Way to serve no purpose.

What's the new plan? I'll only be on Facebook when stalking an individual, since stalking a larger group of people is no longer feasible. It's a shame, since I found the old layout to be a convenient way to keep up with people, but hey, according to Mr. Zuckerberg, I'm not worth listening to.