Facebook's WORST two features

There are two features I really hate about Facebook:

1. Email alerts that force you to come back to the website. When someone posts to a wall, sends you a note, or posts do a group Facebook will send you a notification. That's great, except the notification email is like ten lines long and contains everything BUT THE MESSAGE. Here's the standard message... it's just such a waste of time.... UGH!!!

Cathleen wrote something on the Wall for the event "Blogger Dinner & Drinks.

To see what Cathleen wrote, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=19192752832#wall_posts

Thanks,

The Facebook Team
___

Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

2. Having to autoconfirm each friend request with a two step process. UGH. Can't I just accept folks like on Pownce with one click without all this fancy popup nonsense!?!?!? It's such a waste of time.

I think Facebook is moving away from their efficient design and starting to get caught up in the short-term page view trap. I'm sure someone doesn't want to send the notes saying "oh, 8% of our traffic comes from those notes!" What they don't realize is that folks might use Facebook 20x more for emailing notes if it wasn't so horribly designed. Also, folks might add more friends, more often if it wasn't so poorly designed.

If you want to build the best social network out there make it the easiest to use with the least page view refreshes. Please God.

Tags: facebook

Nov 1st 2007 10:41AM
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1. #1 is the real bugger. #2 doesn't bother me because I just ignore almost 75% requests.

Posted at 11:06AM on Nov 1st 2007 by Avinash

2. Well said Jason. You've pinpointed why I've resisted actually using facebook much lately. A friend just showed me a path to automate a twitter-bot to populate a goog-cal.(http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2007/11/event-promotion.html) My needs are more along those lines these days - not getting email to go to a site to approve some action to enable me to do something later.

Posted at 11:07AM on Nov 1st 2007 by Matt Souden

3. A typical example of a great idea made commercial, I would expect to see more changes pretty soon.

Good to meet you Jason

Dan Horton SEO

Posted at 11:34AM on Nov 1st 2007 by dan horton seo

4. Those email alerts drive me nuts! "You have a message from so and so". Hey Facebook, since you're sending me an email anyways, why don't you go a head and tell me what they said! Twitter alerts include the content on the message... you only have to go back to twitter (or use their API) if you want to reply to the message. So much nicer.

Posted at 12:10PM on Nov 1st 2007 by Caleb Jenkins

5. I'll add to point 1, usually the email telling you someone has posted to your wall lags a bit (seems to be variable time, guess on load).

So, if you happen to look at facebook, see all your wall posts, reply, then a few hours later get an email about something you had closure on, but you don't know that - it doesn't give you the message, so you check it again to find nothing new. Very frustrating, but I'd guess it's a page view thing there aswell.

Posted at 1:05PM on Nov 1st 2007 by David Stone

6. The Facebook iPhone app gets rid of the two-step process. It's one BIG reason why I got an iPhone.

Posted at 1:22PM on Nov 1st 2007 by Robert Scoble

7. My girlfriend was lamenting #1 just the other day, when a friend made a post on her wall that was literally two words but she had to click through to read it. Very obnoxious, and it doesn't seem to jive with the rest of the Facebook ethos. Maybe someone popular *cough*Jason*cough* should start one of those Facebook groups/petitions to get them to fix this.

#2 is also annoying. I find the metadata in Step 2 valuable, but there's no reason it couldn't all be consolidated into a single step.

Come on, Facebook, we love you, but we're busy people! Don't waste our time!

Posted at 1:34PM on Nov 1st 2007 by Jordan Running

8. Addendum: I just remembered that on LiveJournal, when someone leaves a comment on one of your posts, not only does the email notification include the full text of their comment, it also includes a form right in the email where you can post a reply, without even visiting the web site itself. This might only be a "Plus" feature, but it's brilliant and shows, I think, that Six Apart is focused on users, not pageviews. Facebook should steal this feature.

Posted at 1:41PM on Nov 1st 2007 by Jordan Running

9. You can add group update notifications to that list. Even as the admin of group on Facebook, I have to click over to see if there's been any activity. Very lame.

Posted at 3:05PM on Nov 1st 2007 by Alexander Grundner

10. Funny enough, the BlackBerry Facebook app eliminates these issues. Instead of getting an email you get a Facebook notification that you can act on right away (accept friend requests, see wall posts, etc). You can also update your status directly. Here's a good overview: http://www.blakebrannon.com/2007/10/31/blackberry-facebook-app-the-game-changes-again/

I guess everyone forgot that BlackBerry exists with the iPhone around.

Posted at 7:21PM on Nov 1st 2007 by jason

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