Facebook’s Epic Fail

RELATED STORY: If you use Google Chrome, click here to remove Timeline from your personal Facebook page. It really works!

Regular users to Facebook have long been used to the regular updates and changes made to the system by the developers. Some of the changes we bristled at, but most were very good and a needed forward step in the code’s evolution. But then, somewhere in a string of unbroken successes, Facebook built the social media equivalent of the doomed Ford Edsel. Welcome to the Facebook Timeline.

Presenting the Facebook Timeline: The Ford Edsel of Social Media

For many years, Mark Zuckerberg and his myriad developers toiled long and hard and produced one grand-slam home run after another. They tinkered and poked and prodded, and in the process created  a seemingly unsinkable social media revenue stream. Then the iceberg they call Timeline reared it’s (very) ugly head off the starboard bow. So what is, you ask, the problem with the new Facebook Timeline? The major complaints that we have received are as follows:

Complaint #1: Timeline is a resource hog. Pre-Timeline Facebook pages loaded very quickly and easily. They were laid out in an eye-pleasing and straight-forward style. Graphics and banners were kept to a minimum. The Facebook smart phone app worked the same way. Simple, easy and fast. But in the Timeline code, which breaks out into layers ALL your activity since you first created the account, everything has to load before the page is all in. For people on lower-level broadband – 6-12mbps – this is an agonizing process. We run NTEB at 24mbps and it is scarcely better. Now, for people using DLS, their pages crash so often they usually get frustrated and ‘x’ out of the site. The official Facebook iPhone app gets so overworked attempting to load the Timeline that using it is nearly impossible. We have deleted it off of our smart phones as it is functionally unusable.

Even Facebook's own official Timeline page loads with gaps and missing data. Smooth...

Complaint #2: Timeline is horrible for fan pages. Pre-Timeline fan pages were laid out in a nice, easy-to-read tabloid style. Posts were displayed like how you read a newspaper, with the newest posts on top. Perfect. Timeline takes that simple perfection and quarantines all fan posts into a Timeline jail box on the right-hand side which makes finding new posts a chore, and segregates page owners from page users. The net effect of this is that no one, admin and posters alike, can find where anything is, and even after they know where it is, it is no fun reading it. Timeline is like timeout. Now, for some unexplained reason, group pages retain the old tabloid style that worked so well.

Complaint #3: Nothing works right. Nothing about Timeline works right. There is no logical flow, so you can’t find how to manage or change it’s features. It is so bug-filled that after the 3rd or 4th time it crashes you just close the page and go see what’s new on Drudge Report. (Note To Self, Mark…this is the OPPOSITE of a good effect.). Every attempt we made to read an email through the Safari web browser on our iPhones ended in a 100% failure rate. Timeline + Smart Phones = Rubbish.

The Net Effect

Our little NTEB Facebook page has just about 30,000 fans, which we think is a very respectable amount of fans for a page to have. We had steady upticks in new members and post activity every month since we launched in December 2009. But since Timeline was rolled out, things have slowed down considerably. People don’t like not being able to find their posts, so they post less. They don’t like be segregated to the Timeline jail, so they post less. Less posting means less people joining new pages because they don’t like Timeline.

I personally know lots of people now that hate Timeline so much that they deactivate their profiles for months at a time. I have never seen that happen in all the years that I have been on Facebook. This is a very real, very serious issue that Mr. Zuckerberg and Company need to address, and that right quick.

Please note the following story from the New York Post: “Facebook posted its first-ever quarter-over-quarter revenue decline in the first three months of the year — despite its best efforts to bolster its ad business ahead of its upcoming public offering. Or as one analyst put it: Its most important quarter ever, blown. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network saw revenue slip to $1.06 billion in the latest quarter from $1.3 billion in the last three months of 2011, according to a regulatory filing yesterday. Facebook’s first-quarter revenue a year ago was level with the holiday quarter at $731 million. “Your first-ever drop,” said Sam Hamadeh, CEO of research firm PrivCo. “That’s the last thing investors need to see before your IPO.” source – NY Post

What our readers think of Timeline:

  • S Michael Hauserman ”Can’t stand the timeline! If it wasn’t for chatting with friends in other states I’d be outta here!”
  • Denise Baker ”Im praying mine doesnt go to timeline…..or Im off also.”
  • Lynn Koskey ”Not on it yet, thank goodness. I don’t like it at all!”
  • Carolyn Shuford ”DONT KNOW ANYONE THAT DOES LIKE IT …SO PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS..”
  • Donnie Breland ”Good. Maybe the people “In Charge” will hear the money leaving the bank accounts if they haven’t heard our voices.”
  • Daniel Sheffield Sr. ”Timeline SUCKS!”
  • J’ne Coykendall ”HATE.IT.”
  • Maria Sekar ”Wrote to Mark Zuckerberg about Timeline, no response. I will not use FB as often because I do not like Timeline. I still have the old one.”
  • Mindy Lanier ”It should have been a choice. There should have been a way to remove it for the ones who dont like it. Its to much clutter and just makes no sense!”
  • Linda Baker Harbison ”I detest the new Timeline. Too much work to read a person’s profile page and the pics are too big, right up in your face! If they kick me over to it, I’m 90% sure I’m off here.”

So there you have it. The question is this – will Mark Zuckerberg, who was smart enough to create Facebook, be able to swallow enough of his ego to either fix or scrap Timeline? Will he even acknowledge that Timeline is the main, over-arching reason why people are using Facebook less?

Time will tell…stay tuned.

RELATED STORY: If you use Google Chrome, click here to remove Timeline from your personal Facebook page. It really works!