The Ensuckification of Facebook Continues
It’s official: Facebook is forcing us all to switch our profiles to the new “Timeline” format, whether we want it or not. I can assure you that, empirically, it sucks.
Back when I was studying journalism, rather than making fun of journalists, they taught us that a newspaper or magazine layout should follow a Z pattern. A reader’s eyes quite naturally start at the top left corner, scan right, zip down and to the left, then right again — so your layout should work with human nature to make the sale.
They taught us to put the newest and most important information — the item that would get readers to spend a quarter — on the top left corner. (A quarter? Yeah, I was learning this a long time ago. But it’s a timeless lesson.) If the big item was big enough, give it the whole top line of the Z. The second biggest story follows on the next part of the Z, followed by the third, and then the fourth — if there’s room for four. Three, they told us, was more or less ideal. Too much information, and the reader loses focus before he ponies up the 25¢.
Here’s the layout for Timeline.
What dominates the top third of the screen? Static information. Your name, your banner (I don’t have a banner yet, so just a headshot), and some personal data like job and where you went to school. You know, stuff that doesn’t change very much, or at all. In other words, the first thing a visitor to your profile sees is a bunch of crap they already know. And lots of people are putting up big, busy banners which dominate your eyeballs. Timeline isn’t as bad as MySpace, but only because Facebook doesn’t let you use a zillion different fonts or animated GIFs. But let’s keep that quiet, before Zuckerberg gets any more bright ideas.
The next place your eyeballs travel is to the status update box. That’s fine for you, lousy for visitors. After that, something called “Activity.” Well, I know who I just friended, and you’re probably not all that interested. So… why the prominence?
Finally, in fourth place, we reach my most recent status update. If you’re visiting my Timeline to see, oh I dunno, my freakin’ Timeline, you’ve had to zip all over the page to find it. And I hope you don’t want to see more than one item, because you’re not going to be able to do so without scrolling the page.
And when you do scroll, the Timeline isn’t a line at all. It’s boxes of info to the either side of a line you practically need to squint to see. At a casual glance — and we’re talking Facebook here, not Britannica — it’s just a mess of boxes. You have to look, really look, to figure out the chronology.
Oh, except the second box isn’t a status update after all. It’s a box of eight of my friends, chosen seemingly at random.
All this is an improvement how?
You might complain that it’s not like Facebook’s old profile pages were set up like the famous newspaper Z. True enough. But they were set up like a sensible web page, in three columns. The lefthand column was skinny, and filled with static data. The righthand column was skinny, too, and featured your waiting requests and a tasteful vertical banner ad. The big fat center column, the thing your visitors’ eyeballs were sucked right into, was all of your updates, arranged in one nice vertical stack. You scrolled down to get to the oldest stuff, always easily aware of the chronology.
I’m sure Facebook spent a lot of time and money developing the Timeline. They don’t seem to have spent any time with any actual users.
UPDATE: I’ve just discovered, quite accidentally, another reason Timeline sucks. If you post a picture cropped in a landscape orientation, Facebook will thoughtfully re-crop it to a portrait orientation. Half of your photos have never looked worse!
it’s not just facebook. i remember when television and movies spent time and money trying to make the programs watchable. blue screens, steadycams, natural structures that didn’t make one look away. today try to watch ten minutes without something exploding in your eyes. unwatchable camera motion, ridiculous extreme close ups, colors that never occur in nature. all in the name of…i don’t know what. there seems to be no attention to user friendly material. it is all change for the sake of change. more and more clutter in the name of “edgy” or something.
Arrrrrg! No!!! I’ve been holding out against the stupid timeline because it’s the most obnoxious reading format ever. It’s absolutely shocking to me that someone is getting paid more in an hour probably than I make in a month to design that crap. I know next to nothing about web design, but growing up with the internet and visiting jillions of web pages makes it pretty easy to determine what formats/layouts are easy on the eye and to follow, and which ones aren’t. I’m starting a new job in September at a small, small business and part of my job will be running the business’s website, which before had been designed and maintained by their marketing guy, who they were paying $500 a month to do, and the entire thing looks like a huge cluster.
Me, I suggested this to facebook, as a means of expanding repoitre beyond the “Hi, long time friend, I am a Toyota salesman married to Sally and living in Sussex,you? So many facebook contacts went about this far, which is to say nowhere. It’s why me quit. But with 1777 friends like the author, I guess that is all the depth you want.
If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Put Facebook back the way it was.
Okay, here’s a question—is it possible to remove all traces of oneself from Facebook? To quit the service and permanently delete everything?
That’s a good question, and I’m sorry I don’t have the answer to it.
This is not definitive, but a couple years ago I turned my page off for about a year. When I decided to re-start, I began the “register” (or whatever it’s called) process to create a new page. After entering some of my data, Facebook just magically re-created my old page with everything that had ever been published on it.
Found it! From their help center (I searched for “delete my account”:
Strangely enough, I’ve never felt a burning need to compile a dossier on myself for the world to read.
It’s official: Facebook is forcing us all to switch our profiles to the new “Timeline” format, whether we want it or not.
Welcome to news from a year ago?
KZ: You should be able to, but anything that was public will be in Google’s caches forever. And if it was public, you can’t really expect anything else ever anyway.
That said, I don’t care, myself.
I almost never look at anyone’s profile, and thus don’t see the timeline. Notifications tell me about my own, if anyone posts on it, which they don’t.
And once you get past the stuff at the top, the timeline is in a Z format, as our host wanted.
(I’ve seen every change Facebook has ever done since I joined it greeted with wailing and confusion and doom… and then swiftly become the New Normal, to be greeted with wailing and confusion and doom when it changed.)
No, I did not “want” the Z layout. I explained that if you’re going to have one, the timeless manner in which it ought to be executed.
Instead, I praised FB’s (soon-to-be-defunct) three-column layout as “sensible” for a website.
My online journalism school didn’t teach the Z pattern.
It taught the boustrophedon pattern.
Try it. You’ll not like it.
I still (knock on wood) have the old interface. Perusing my “friends” list, some have the timeline, some no.
For those who want to “go back,” there’s a partial solution: F.B. Purity. It runs under Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. The Greasemonkey extension is required, while Safari needs GreaseKit.
Basically it allows all sorts of tweaks to FB, including eliminating the timeline. Sort of. From the FAQ:
Can’t find any decent screen shots, but you can always remove FB Purity, no?
The only other caveat is that it only works for what you see. Anyone else visiting your page will see that God-awful timeline. One solution would be to include a link to FB Purity so they can join the cool crowd.
Meh. Timeline can be as sucky as it wants. I rarely look at it–mine or anyone else’s.
My big problem with the format is how hard it is to find the bio information if you’re not familiar with the layout–it’s not intuitive anymore.
Well, isn’t Facebook making money like, oh, the Federal government?
Shirley a success record like that shouldn’t be questioned by some user outsider.
yes?
“Here’s the layout for Timeline.”
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Interesting layout!
I totally agree about the timeline. I get confused why this post is here and why that one is there. Hell, I didn’t even notice the line running down the middle of the screen until I read this post. I was always like, “Ya know for a timeline that doesn’t seem to be in a very straight line…”.