If anyone else had trouble reading the site because of font rendering in Firefox (what is up with those r's, D's and S's!?), I found readability made it digestible.
Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
51–60 of 137 posts
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#52"the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.” Does anyone know what quote he's alluding to here? I recall skimming an article on it some time ago, but I can't actually find the original. I've been thinking about this trend - and, quite frankly, being depressed by it - a lot recently.
This is where I first saw it. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
That's the one I was thinking of! Thanks very much.
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it is their New Coke, then what you mean is they can roll it back to something exactly the same, and then have conspiracy nuts repeat nonsense claims that it is different now. New Coke was not a way to distract people while they changed the recipe of classic, classic didn't change.
Classic did change. It went from having cane sugar before to having high fructose corn syrup afterwards.
Well, according to Snopes this is a myth; bottlers had been allowed to use HFCS in original Coke prior to the introduction of New Coke. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
The new product continued to be sold and retained the name Coca-Cola (until 1992, when it was officially renamed Coca-Cola II), so the old product was named Coca-Cola Classic, also called Coke Classic, later just Coke and for a short period of time it was referred to by the public as Old Coke. Many who tasted the reintroduced formula were not convinced that the first batches really were the same formula that had supposedly been retired that spring. This is partially true because Coca-Cola Classic differed from the original formula, as all bottlers who hadn't already done so were using high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar to sweeten the drink
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#54The problem with timeline, for me, is lack of context. Scroll back to the beginning of my life on facebook and you see exchanges between me and my then girlfriend. Scrolling through 5 years worth of status updates gave you context for this (sortof), it was psychologically "far" away. Being able to just click "2006", and easily see that stuff is creepy . This is why I can't stand this timeline nonsense. So...do I dele…
This is also my main problem with it. The idea is nice to have some sort of diary where you log important events in your life so that you can scroll back in someone's history and see when important things happened.
But sometime before Timeline, Facebook made a change so that each post has an individual visibility to give users more control or whatever, and when I switched over to Timeline, all my old posts that weren't private automatically appeared on my timeline, and I can't easily change the visibility of all those old posts, that are now much more easily accessible.
I want the newer posts on my Timeline to be visible, so others can see the latest crap I shared with my friends, but I want the older posts to fade into obscurity, unless I actively bring them back again.
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#55It has its rough edges, but I have to say that scrolling down the Timeline is a more personal and emotional experience than can be found anywhere else.
I have to disagree. Going through a photo gallery is far more emotional and personal than browsing a two column grid.
Photos are a pretty emotional experience, true. However I think there's a major difference. Typically photos on my facebook represent moments, short memories in time... mostly happy.
Looking at a photo makes me remember the context of the photo. However a status update is different. They're more frequent, they're less significant. They give context around the less important things.
For example, I remember the first time I looked at my timeline there was a status update that said something along the lines of "Oh man new doughnut at the Dunkin!" I wrote it a few years ago, and it was Completely pointless, and meaningless.. but then I remembered it, because later that day my mom was hit by a car. The entire events of that day flashed in my mind. Frankly that was pretty emotional for me.
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#56Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.
The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December. It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily. This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'
As for not going with a straight chronological list, I think that really the idea behind Timeline is to take all the information that was put in Facebook and present it in something that is more akin to digital scrapbooking. They want you to have something more personal and emotional so that you're more attached to it. Their ad about it is clear about that: Facebook should be the place where you keep track of your life and expose it (a certain way) to and share it with your friends.
For that, you want to highlight a specific picture or event, but still have little anecdotes sprinkled here and there. They want you to go through the Timeline like you'd go through a photo album where you'd have a mix of the big events (graduation, marriage, births, etc.) with the little things, so that you can hear "oh, remember that one? When we went to Disneyland and you fell in the pool…", "you were so mad at him that day! Look at what you wrote on your wall…", etc.
Not having just a list makes it a bit more interesting to peruse. It's like going through a shoebox of photos and souvenirs, spread them out and you see some things, not others… I'm not saying they've nailed it, but it's a first version of it and it's an interesting experiment. It's hard to make an interesting photo album by hand, it's even harder to make something semi-automated.
As as side-note: The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December.
I find that interesting since I personally rarely see people's profiles or timelines.
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#57If anyone else had trouble reading the site because of font rendering in Firefox (what is up with those r's, D's and S's!?), I found readability made it digestible. http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets
Stopped using Readability and switched to Readable when their bookmarks started doing funky stuff involving their servers.
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it is their New Coke, then what you mean is they can roll it back to something exactly the same, and then have conspiracy nuts repeat nonsense claims that it is different now. New Coke was not a way to distract people while they changed the recipe of classic, classic didn't change.
Classic did change. It went from having cane sugar before to having high fructose corn syrup afterwards.
Not sure about that.
What Coca Cola actually ships from Atlanta is the syrup, unsweetened. The bottlers add water and sugar to this, and AFAIK [1], it is up to their discretion what type of sugar to use.
This is one of the reasons that Coke tastes different in different places - a can of Coke in Montreal is very different from one in Toronto.
I'd have fact-checked this, but for some reason, Wikipedia is down... :)
[1] Perhaps this is no longer the case, but it certainly was in 1989, when I "interned" at a Coke bottling facility in Harare, Zimbabwe for a week
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#59Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.
The new timeline is why I quit FaceBook in December. It creates a badly jumbled view of the information I was really hoping to see -- what's going on with me and my friends? I can handle a straight chronological list very easily. This is an interesting answer to the question 'why didn't they stick with the simplest approach?'
what's going on with me and my friends
That's what your feed (i.e. the "main" page) is for, right?
The timeline is for when you want to look at just one person's activity... it's basically "WHERE user = 'xyz' ORDER BY entry_date DESC".
Re: Facebook Timeline is too awful to be an accident
#60If anyone else had trouble reading the site because of font rendering in Firefox (what is up with those r's, D's and S's!?), I found readability made it digestible. http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets
That's google webfonts. Looks great on my mac but not so great on my PC :/