Facebook September 2011 Updates
Facebook September Update- more bloat, more confusing, more disappointment, less privacy.
Let’s take a brief moment to see what Facebook looked like after its conception, before the bloat, before the over-monetization(too many ads), before the horrid breaches of personal privacy:
Facebook again has undergone some major layout and design changes. In addition to these changes are more changes that affect a user’s privacy.
So, what’s new with the new Facebook? Let’s go through a short list of things that have changed overnight to the world’s largest social network.
New news feed above chat bar
The still-newish chat interface has been cut in half horizontally, with the upper half showing your friend’s updates. Basically, Facebook decided to make sure that even though you aren’t on your home page, you are now forced to see and read all of the pointless updates your friends post in real time. There have also been reports that this new block shows snippets of wall conversations that happen between Facebook users who are your friends; to make things worse, an even more gregarious breach of privacy is that you don’t have to be friends with one of the individuals in the conversation, to see it, or have it be seen by a non friend.
What this means- If you are having a conversation with someone in private chat, not only is it possible that this conversation is being displayed to all your friends, but even people who are not your friends can potentially see this conversation. This was the case before the update, but now these conversations are basically impossible to miss now. WTF IS THIS FACEBOOK?
This new feed also live updates everything that you like, and all of your friend’s statuses and posts. For instance, if someone has lots of likes and lots of friends, billions of bits of information are being wasted on instant status updates that no one cares to see.
This new news feed bar can be somewhat hidden by dragging the bar that separates the chat bar and news bar upward.. but it can not be totally removed. The updates are only hidden, and they continue to pour in on a minute by minute basis.
More marred privacy settings
Privacy settings have moved and changed yet again. Unlike most other site privacy control panels for other websites, your privacy settings are not in one section.
There are several ways to change your privacy settings now, and it seems that some of these setting can conflict and over ride other settings, making the user even unsure which information is being displayed based on what combination of privacy settings.
The “inline audience selector” Facebook has been moving towards Seems like a good idea at first, however all these settings have gotten to the point where it’s almost necessary for a new Facebook user to have some kind of seminar just to weed through all these settings.
There seems to be two main ways to modify Facebooks privacy settings post September update:
First, to the left of the new news feed above the chat box, there is a drop down arrow. Click on that arrow, and then click on “Privacy settings”
This bring you to a new page, where Facebook states that some specific Facebook accessing apps like Facebook for Blackberry still don’t have an inline audience selector. Here you can control how these apps update your Facebook account based on the privacy settings you choose. It is recommended that you NEVER select the public option ANYWHRE in the Facebook privacy settings unless you have a specific comment or link you wish to share with the world.
Second, and the best way to control who sees what you do and when you do, is to use the inline audience selectors in your profile account settings. If you make frequent posts to certain group walls, it is proper etiquette to disable these updates from showing up on other users Facebook pages. Of course, the overwhelmingly majority of Facebook users don’t give a**** (insert expletive here) about these settings, and someone with several hundred friends is forced to see all the meaningless updates and likes while wasting bandwidth in the process.
Sick and tired of seeing “Joe Shmo liked John Jimbos” status.
Thanks, but no thanks Facebook. I really don’t need to see EVERY SINGLE like or status update all my friends (and group/page likes for that matter) make around the clock. Thanks for making Facebook more bloated and complicated than ever before.