The ethics of unfriending

Some more musings on Facebook, this time the ethics of unfriending and when it is acceptable to remove someone from your friend list, an action that can easily cause offence and awkwardness if not handled properly. I have recently been suffering fairly regular unfriendings by people I considered good friends and over the past few months have seen my friend count steadily decrease. Of course, a user is perfectly within their rights to control their friend list and unfriend anyone at any time, but these unfriendings often come completely out of the blue so why they have chosen to unfriend me is something I struggle to understand. Personally I consider unfriending someone to actually be quite rude and something only to be done with very good reason as there are plenty of alternatives.

Facebook and the tag-comments

I haven't written a tech-related post for a while, so here's one on what seems to a relatively new phenomenon on Facebook that is spreading at a rapid rate and really detracts from the user experience: the 'tag-comment'. I can't be the only one who, when viewing comments on a post, wants to see people's opinions and reactions to it, rather than a huge and meaningless list of names who have been tagged by their friends just to draw their attention to the post.

Clearing up a Facebook misconception

Facebook seems to be one of those Marmite things that you either love or hate. For all its faults (and there are many) it serves a useful purpose, but there is still strong resistance to it in some quarters, especially among the older generation who may not fully understand the world of social media. One particular misconception is especially prevalent among those who don't use it: there is a widespread belief that Facebook is one of those platforms that is completely invisible and unusable unless you have an account, which is not the case at all and there is a great deal of content that can be viewed without a Facebook account being necessary. Read on to find out how so much of the world of Facebook is available to you even if you don't have an account.

Facebook's secret feature change

I'm sure many of you will agree that a lot of the changes Facebook make don't improve the user experience at all, and I have been very critical of them, but for once they have actually made a beneficial change that is genuinely useful and solves a real issue. However, they seem to have neglected to tell anyone about it as the majority of users haven't realised anything has changed and the problematic behaviour it was supposed to prevent is still occurring so I feel more attention needs to be drawn to this change. It affects what happens when you reject a friend request: that person now no longer has the ability to send you another request so you won't be bombarded by those annoying persistent users who keep sending a new request every time you reject one, and this should have put an end to that irritating practice of friend requests being left pending indefinitely.

Ctrl-Z again!

Just a quick one to vent my frustrations. Remember my angry post about the stupid Ctrl-Z behaviour that deletes the entire text of your work-in-progress post? Even though I now know about this there is a further twist that I've just fallen foul of, resulting in the total loss of a piece that had been at the draft stage for several months and was nearing completion - I can't be bothered to rewrite it all so now it will never be published. What happened is that I once again pressed Ctrl-Z too many times and wiped the text, but knowing I would be snookered once the autosave function ran I immediately pressed close to exit without saving and preserve my work. Sure enough, a message popped up saying "You have unsaved changes that will be lost" so I clicked OK expecting my changes to be discarded and the text to be preserved, but no, it appears to have saved anyway and all my hard work was gone with no way to get it back. It seems you can't win and as soon as you make the fatal mistake of pressing Ctrl-Z your work is as good as gone.

I know people have suggested Blogger posts should be drafted outside of Blogger, e.g. in Microsoft Word, so you have a backup copy, but that really shouldn't be necessary and defeats the point of a cloud service that should provide better safety and availability without needing to keep multiple copies. If I thought for one minute it would make any difference I would be writing a strongly-worded complaint to Google, but sadly this is a company that is not immune from the attitude I so deplore of large IT firms not giving a damn about their users and completely ignoring any criticism. I guess I'll just have to train myself not to use Ctrl-Z in Blogger, but that will be difficult as it is a universal shortcut that I use all the time and works correctly everywhere else, and the proper solution is for Google to remove this behaviour. Beware once again - the power of Ctrl-Z is even mightier than I thought!

Making better use of the news feed

As a software developer myself, I understand that one of the biggest challenges facing IT companies, especially the large ones with user numbers in the thousands or even millions, is effectively communicating product changes to these users. Many companies fail dismally at this, resulting in much of their user base remaining quite simply unaware that these changes have been made unless they stumble across them accidentally. Putting news in a support forum or on a webpage is ineffective as the majority of users don't visit these sites and won't see these posts, and emails are fraught with problems of delivery failures and spam filtering with no guarantee of receipt. What is needed is a way to communicate information on software changes directly to the user through a medium they are already using to receive other types of news, and it suddenly occurred to me that Facebook already have the perfect platform for achieving this, yet are not exploiting the full power of it.

Further Facebook friend frustration

Following up on a previous post written a few months ago, I have started to notice a new form of irritating behaviour becoming increasingly common on Facebook recently. Many friend requests are never being accepted or rejected by the recipient and are simply being left pending indefinitely, and in some cases this appears to be deliberate and intentional. It only takes a second to click the 'Accept' or 'Not now' buttons so at first I thought this was simply laziness, and to some extent it probably is but I've started to realise Facebook themselves may also be partly responsible.

To support my argument I have been regularly monitoring someone I sent a request to and have confirmed that she has accepted friend requests from other people since receiving mine that is still pending, and thus has definitely been online and seen my request. I find that extremely annoying: when accepting those requests there is no good reason why she couldn't have dealt with mine at the same time, so I just don't understand why it has been ignored and others accepted. Please people, if you don't want to be friends with someone, at least make the effort to let them know by rejecting their request and don't just leave them in suspense forever.

Beware of Ctrl-Z!

This is not the post I was intending to publish today as that one fell victim to an infuriating feature of Blogger behaviour so I was moved to write about this instead as a warning to others. I have a first-class honours degree in computer science and am currently studying for an MSc in the same subject so I am by no means the average novice user and I feel I am suitably qualified to comment on how stupid and dangerous this feature is, particularly as Blogger is intended to be a simple tool that can be used by people without high levels of computer literacy.

I'm sure everyone knows what Ctrl-Z does: it is a pretty much universal shortcut to undo your most recent change. That's all fine and very useful but Blogger's implementation of Ctrl-Z has another nasty little trick up its sleeve: if you press it again when there are no previous edits in the history, it deletes the entire content of the post to leave you with a blank page. This isn't documented anywhere and the one relevant post I could find dates back to 2011 so it's not a new problem. That's not what an undo function is for so why they have decided to implement this feature and what benefit it has is unclear, but combine it with the automatic saving that is turned on by default and you have a recipe for disaster. For novice users this can doubtless cause blind panic and extreme anger as they think "Oh my God, where did all my work go?!", and possibly drive them to stop blogging as a result.

The trouble with Facebook groups

Facebook groups are great. They bring together people with common interests, no matter how obscure, and are a fantastic way to share things with like-minded individuals, and if there isn't a group for your interest you can easily set one up. That's the theory anyway, but unfortunately there are a few problems with the way Facebook have decided to implement the group system that make it a rather less pleasant experience than it should be.

Time, gentlemen, please

...stop trying to sort my news by 'interestingness'

A new trend seems to be spreading through the world of computing and I have to say it is one I deplore as it is technology for the sake of it and actually makes the user experience worse in my view. Not so long ago, your news feeds would be organised in a simple chronological order with the newest stories at the top, so you could scroll down until you saw a post you had seen before and instantly know you had seen all the new content and everything below was older. All nice and simple and everyone understands the concept of time, but that isn't good enough for many technology giants as sorting by time is basic stuff that doesn't show off their talents. Nowadays, there is an increasing trend to implement algorithms that deliver content organised by relevance or 'interestingness', which while technically clever do nothing to enhance usability and are a solution to a problem that doesn't appear to exist.

Facebook friend frustration

I hope I'm not alone in my feelings towards Facebook friends - the sense of satisfaction when a friend request is accepted but also, more pertinently to this post, that feeling of disappointment and self-doubt when you realise a request you were confident would be accepted has been either rejected or worse still simply ignored and left hanging as a pending request. These feelings are even worse when you see these same people becoming friends with many of your friends and making you feel left out.

Facebook groups and the curse of the unavailable attachment

Something that has been annoying me for ages and shows no sign of being fixed gives me cause to have another dig at Facebook I'm afraid. I'm sure you've all experienced this - someone shares something to a group but all you see is this message:

Utterly pointless really - why bother telling you someone has made a post you're not allowed to see, especially as the comments then just fill up with people saying they can't see it. I know why it happens - the person whose post has been shared has set its privacy settings to something other than 'public' so those group members who are not their friends don't have permission to view it. As the person who shared it is likely to be friends with the person who originally posted it, they probably won't even know some people can't see it.

Why are links from Facebook crashing my browser?

Another tech post detailing a problem that's really starting to annoy me but I haven't managed to find a solution to. Whenever I try to follow a link to an external website from the Facebook app for Android, it crashes the browser with that patronising and unhelpful 'Unfortunately, Internet has stopped' message. Having read that Android's built-in 'Internet' browser is not the best, I downloaded Chrome from the app store, only for the exact same thing to happen. The browser starts to load, but before the URL even appears in the address bar, it shuts down and generates the error message so I can't even see the URL it's trying to load.

This behaviour is consistent with any external link from Facebook, regardless of the external site's address, and is getting so frustrating as it seems something very simple has been overlooked somewhere. I don't know if the cause is the Facebook app formatting URLs in a way that common browsers can't understand, or something missing from the browsers' URL handling, but I suspect the former as the problem occurs in multiple browsers. If anyone has any further information, or even better a solution, please leave a comment as this problem is starting to drive me mad.

Are Facebook missing a trick?

A tech-related post this time - there's no vehicular content here. What started out as an idle 'I wish they would do that' thought developed into a realisation that Facebook may be missing out on a vast untapped stream of data, which given their insatiable appetite for knowing everything about everyone surprises me.

What happens when a friend request is rejected or declined? In short, nothing - the requester is not notified and the request is even removed from their activity log leaving no evidence that it ever happened, which inevitably causes confusion as they think maybe they didn't send the request after all and send it again so the other person gets annoyed by having to reject it again. Anyway, that's not really my point. I don't know about others but I only send friend requests to people I have actually met and I think have a high likelihood of accepting. The majority do but on the odd occasions when someone decides not to I would quite like to receive some feedback on why they did so - is it because they don't like the content of my profile, they just don't feel they know me well enough, or something else? If I don't know what's wrong, there's nothing I can do that might make them more likely to accept, but it feels quite rude messaging someone who has just rejected my friend request asking why they did it.

Having thought about this from a purely personal point of view, I then realised that collecting this information would surely give Facebook themselves a massively valuable insight into the psychology of their users and the type of people they might want to be friends with. As a simple example, let's say person X tends to reject requests from users with certain characteristics because he doesn't like the content of their timelines, but accepts requests from users with other characteristics. Knowing this would allow Facebook to provide much better focusing in person X's 'people you may know' list with a consequently greater chance that he will become friends with them and Facebook can do their 'your friends like this so you might too' marketing wizardry. Maybe they could even use this information to help build up statistical data on the probability of any given friend request being rejected and the likely reason why!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't something like this exist a few years ago? After declining a friend request I'm sure you had to select an option, which I think may have been along the lines of 'do you know this person?' and selecting 'no' may have had certain consequences for the requester. Like so many Facebook features, this quietly disappeared just as suddenly as it appeared with no explanation, but expanding it into a list of reasons for declining would have provided useful feedback, both for the requester and more importantly for Facebook themselves.

Any thoughts, or is it just me who wants to know why my friend requests get rejected?