Is It Time To Say Goodbye To Facebook? | eMagzin

Facebook has been around for quite sometime now but nobody really questions its existence anymore since everybody loves it so much and enjoys using it — and why not! It has connected us to people we never would have imagined to talk to or bump into, it honestly did bring about a new social era, people have educational groups on Facebook and of course love reading each others statuses.

Ze Interface

I am a big Facebook addict myself and there is no denying that. But lately, I have started to feel suffocated on this giant social platform. For starters, their interface keeps getting cluttered from time to time with new things piling on to each other. Talking strictly from a good user interface’s point of view: its a wreck. One can never really concentrate on any part of the screen for too long and it would be amazing to see how they ruin it further, not to mention the ever annoying and constantly moving, more recent introduction of the “Ticker” on the right. One would expect something better from the most used website in the world, to be a little innovative when it comes to their interface but so far, I don’t see many people complaining about it, the ones who do have applied for their dual citizenship with Google+. This is touching just the surface of what has been annoying me with Facebook lately!

KA-CHING!

Next I come to Facebook’s new focus- “Promoted posts, statuses, everything!” What kind of sorcery is this you might ask? Well, if suggested pages for you and advertisements on the right were not enough for Facebook, they now want to milk you for being socially addicted to their own social web of updates laid down by them over the years! I got the shock of my life when I was asked to pay for updating a status of mine, well not directly, but they asked me to pay if I wanted it to appear more on other people’s timelines. Making this option available in pages for businesses makes sense as everybody wants to out-do the other brand when it comes to social media marketing. Remember that scene from the movie “The Social Network” when Jesse Eisenberg says that he doesn’t want advertisements on the site! Well maybe if the real Zuckerberg would take a note of that then I wouldn’t be writing this article here. Will the real Zuckerberg please stand up!

XYZ would like to add you to their ABC network on Facebook!

Give me a break! Third party applications were supposed to be just another thing which one could do on Facebook while social networking, but they seem to have taken the limelight. People would rather talk to others on a poker table than use the conventional chat and statuses on FB. Sure, go ahead and do that, but why on earth would you want an invite to be sent to your entire list, time after time after time until the point your “friend” has to either ban requests from that particular app or just YOU! But wait, that’s not all, it doesn’t just stop there: once you block 1 app there is already the next batch of requests awaiting action from you. It has become a separate market in itself, Facebook Apps. From professional networks to games, I’m sure you’ve gotten those “requests”! If I haven’t accepted your request the first 5 times, buddy, I’m not gonna do it the next 5 times either! The only reason I took so long to completely migrate from Orkut to fb was because whenever I logged in to Facebook back in the days, there was some zombie out there to eat me or a mafia person out there to shoot me! Enough of the app request menace. FB, devise a better method!

Alternatives?

There are many options out there on the virtual market nowadays wanting to mimic Facebook in many ways and failing. I shifted to Facebook because it was easier to find lost friends and to communicate with people without any hindrances, but now, my needs have evolved from just socially adding friends on my lists, to also communicating with them effectively, so I don’t care if I have less people on my Google+ circles, at least I am able to have unadulterated interactions with my peers. Also, G+ is a great place to explore new information and it automatically curates posts according to your interests which makes it such a pleasure to browse. With their new events and photo sharing features it’s such a breeze to perform tasks on it. Not to mention the completely awesome Google hangout. So I think you know what alternatives are out there Also, I don’t see G+ adding ads anytime soon and even if they do, they’re going to be as minimal as they can be.