2011: Dear Jesse Eisenberg

Wrote this open letter to Facebook after one update too many, in 2011.

To whomever it may concern / Customer Relations / Trash Folder

I am writing to you to express my concern over some recent advances in the Facebook User Interface which I in disagreement with. If I could please distract you from your time tinkering with things that are absolutely perfectly fine so you could read this little bit.

I have a series of small concerns and these are as follow

• The main driver for this letter was the removal of the SEND button [This might not be the correct name of the button, but it’s not there now, so I can’t check] on the comments under statuses/photos/links/everything. And, well... Why? What possible benefit could this bring you, me, or anyone in the world ever? I do realise that users now don’t have to take .2 of a second moving the mouse over the SEND button and can just hit enter, but this seems irrelevant, since the very next thing they will do is move the mouse around and navigate to whatever else that want to. Now I would say that learning to now press enter is itself is not a vastly tricky thing to master, but in the odd occasion during commenting I wish to put a sarcastic and quite awesomely witty statement first, and then answer the query/question/random status normally within the same comment field  I now have to press and hold Shift (the left shift is the one I prefer, in case you were interested) and then enter. This results in more work than just pressing enter and clicking send with my mouse. I have estimated that you have trebled my personal output whenever I partake in a multi-paragraph comment. Which is very, very often. And trebling any sort of output means I become less efficient at surfing Facebook whilst working. And that is a terrible thing. Further to this, this change now mean I will forget to Left Shift and Enter a large number of times and look a complete prat. And I hold you, Mr. Eisenberg personally responsible for my upcoming prattist look.

• I had a second complaint in here about the stupid photo album pop up thing when opening on the feed but it appears this does not exist anymore. Not that it in itself was a problem, just something it did was. But it doesn’t anymore. So you are forgiven. Count yourself lucky. This one time.

• The third thing I have complaint with, is if I have scrolled down through hours and hours of status updates and such on my feed and I find a particularly cute photo of something that I wish to look at it, opening this link does so in a new window. Meaning if I want to go back to my feed, by hitting backspace, or the back button on the browser, I am returned to somewhere near the top of the feed. SO I have to scroll ALL the way back down to where I was to keep on with my feed reading. Which I don’t like to do. It affects my wellbeing and blood pressure. This could kill me. Possibly. Can you not do something clever in your computering ways, that does some sort of small in browser pop up thing (similar to the photo thing that narrowly avoided being shouted at) but better?

• Further to this, I would like to move onto Facebook Mobile (for the [clearly] superior ‘droid). Now I love my ‘droid. I have named him Marvin. And I enjoy being on Facebook on Marvin, especially when I am working as a sales executor. But come one... character limits on status updates that are painfully short? You are not Twitter you know! And where are the push notifications for people commenting on your status? They were there. For a week. And now are no longer. Which is probably better than the poor state that they were there before, but come on!  Get it done. It saves me looking at the app every 30 seconds to see if anyone has laughed at my painfully unfunny retorts.

• I guess the main thing that annoys me about these small, relatively unobtrusive changes is that they are still getting signed off onto the live website, when there are still tiny little issues that actually impede the browsing the site occurring. Like comments disappearing. So say I get a notification that Richard Reid [He works for Cambridge you know. Or Oxford. Certainly one of those] has commented on your status, and hastily proceed to open it, only to discover it is not there yet. So I have to reload, or close and reopen or wait five minutes until the comment has decided it does in fact enjoy being read by all and is becomes perfectly visible. Meaning my retort has been stolen by someone who can see it. Fix what is broken before breaking what ain’t! Please.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read this, regardless of the fact you didn’t. If you plan to reply with a stock “thank you for your comments” etc, then please refrain, those replies actually have the opposite effect to what is intended. However, if you would like to address these properly, or in a humour fashion I would gladly receive that. And who know, it might blossom into a blooming romance.

Kind Regards

Craig Thomson

:) x