All you Facebook haterz, get over it!

Listen. Facebook knows a lot more about UI design that you do. We’ve already had a round of moaning once before, and now what? “We like the homepage as it is”, well if we took that approach with everything we’d still be using ICQ for social networking.

I’m not including good quality critique in this, for example, the side bar could be clearer, and there’s not much differentiation between the boxes on this panel. They’ve obviously gone for the Twitter real-time feel, but I think Facebook is more about what pictures than anything else. Did you know that there are over 10 billion photos on Facebook? Of topic, but the site displays up to 300,000 images a second, quite an engineering feat.

And remember, Facebook is free at the point of use, I don’t think it’s a bad deal to be honest. “Oh but they own my data”, whatever, what does that even mean? That they know your age/education/likes/dislikes? Other private companies own data with a comparable “value”: Amazon, Starbucks, TFL etc. but because you pay them you feel like it’s part of the transaction. Maybe this is a wider debate about targeted advertising. Or advertising in general. Another post, another post…

~ by Alex on March 13, 2009.