My Top 5 Facebook Annoyances

I have to say, after using Facebook for a few weeks, the site has really grown on me. As a Myspace refugee, it seems to me that Facebook manages to be both more mature and lower drama than Myspace.

The inevitable conclusion I’ve reached is that, if you’re not a musician or under the age of sixteen, Myspace doesn’t have a lot for you. Facebook lets you make connections without going through all of the B.S. It’s a nice way to keep in touch without getting drowned in drama.

However, this is not to say that Facebook is perfect, far from it. Though I don’t hate the new layout, I’ve still managed to find a lot of things that annoy me endlessly.

So, before I go bald ripping my hair out, here are my top five Facebook annoyances in order of the number of “facepalms” they’ve caused.

5. Facebook Chat

Thank God you can log into Facebook chat via either Adium or other programs. The version that is on the site is practically useless.

The main problem is that no one seems to be able to stay online consistently with it. Every time I click the “Online Friends” button the footer, I make a mental note of the number of people it says is online only to watch that number change, often drastically, in the split second it takes the list to open.

It’s especially frustrating to be chatting with someone, go to send them a message and then be told it can’t be send because they are offline. Sure, I know connectivity sometimes sucks, but Yahoo! doesn’t have this problem. It’s just Facebook.

The sad thing is I really like this idea. I really wish that someone, like Meebo, would create an IM system that not only integrated with my browser but also put the conversations in the status bar. When I’m IMing is the only time I really miss having a Windows-style taskbar.

4. People You May Know

When I first signed up for Facebook the “People You May Know” box was actually kind of useful. Even though I imported all of my email into the system, I missed a few people and it helped me pick some of them up. Great.

After about day three though, it turned into a mass of stupidity. Right now, the number one reason people seem to appear there is because they attended the same school I did. The only problem with that is that nearly 30,000 students were there when I was attending.

Given my small circle of friends at college, my chances of finding someone I know that way effectively zero.

The second most common reason is they are friends with my friends. This assumes, of course, that I know all of the people my friends know and considering most of the people I have on Facebook are well established with hundreds of friends, that too has almost a zero percent chance of working.

I guess I’ll have to find my own friends but, if I were good at that, I wouldn’t need social networking.

3. Photos

The photo system is a real mess, especially if you want to upload more than just a few images.

Want to put up all of your vacation photos? Plan on using two galleries or more. They set a hard limit of sixty per gallery for no obvious reason. This makes it frustrating to put up any large photo set and causes organization to break down fast.

However, the worst problem I have is that I can not get more than about 12 photos to upload at once. Using Facebook’s uploader, anything more results in an error. This is the reason why it took me nearly three hours to upload, tag and rotate about 120 images.

This wouldn’t be so bad if image management was not already a solved problem. With companies like Flickr showing the world how elegant image management can be, Facebook just looks plain stupid.

2. Importing

Facebook is supposed to be your central hub, where people get to know about you and what you’re doing on the Web. That’s an all-around great idea. So why does its import feature stink to the point of uselessness?

Sure, you can connect with your Digg, Reddit, Flick, YouTube, etc. but what if you don’t use those services? Well, you’re out of luck.

You can import one additional RSS feed, but that is it. That means my Plagiarism Today posts make it into my Facebook, about six hours after they hit my site, but I can’t put this site in there nor can I put in my Diigo bookmarks, my Blip.TV videos, my Tumbleblog or anything else that I do.

Sure, you can fix some of this with applications, but shouldn’t this be part of Facebook’s core element? At least allow us to use more than one RSS feed.

Some of us do have online lives outside of Facebook.

1. Social Applications

As a man who prides himself on keeping his cool in tense situations, I am ashamed to admit some of these Facebook applications send me into a rage the likes of which I have not known in some time.

Granted, there are many great Facebook applications. I use a few of them to make up for things that Facebook really should have added on its own, such as Blog Networks, but there are others that are just flat out annoying.

Let me get this straight for anyone that might be wondering. I do not with to be a vampire, werewolf, zombie or any other creature of the night. I do not care how much you “bite”. I do not want to engage in mob, drug or any other kind of wars. I don’t want any gifts. I do not want to be a part of anyone’s entourage, nor do I want to be super poked.

I just want to meet people and talk with them. Radical concept.

I cannot count the number of applications that I have blocked over the past few weeks and I’m sure I’ve left many out. It seems that every time someone signs up, everyone else is in a rush to recruit them for absolutely every kind of social app.

Forget it, I’m not playing. However, this is still the number one reason my hopes get dashed when I get a new notification.

I think I’ve blocked the worst but there are still some very creative people out there.

Conclusions

The bottom line for me is that Facebook is great, but nowhere near perfect.

Fortunately though, a social network is made up not of the apps that run it, but the people on it. In that regard, Facebook has been pretty good to me. I’ve reconnected with some old friends, found a new way to stay in touch with current ones and even made a few new ones.

All in all, it’s been great.

I just wish Facebook itself weren’t quite so annoying.