Random Ramblings

I just discovered that my facebook settings changed about a month ago, such that my post privacy settings have been defaulting to "close friends" instead of "friends." I was wondering why so few people seemed to be commenting/liking/offering advice/etc. Now I know. (For the record, I reset all the tags, so people can go to my wall and see everything they missed. If they want to.)

Now I just need to figure out why I only seem to see about 10% of the "recent activity" on my friends' walls, and vice-versa.

Oh, Facebook, will your annoyances never cease?

As someone who's been playing Zynga's new game, FrontierVille, more or less compulsively since Sunday night, I will say this with full knowledge of what I'm talking about: Zynga is evil. Truly, horribly evil. Not only do they make a game that's so addictive it's pretty much guaranteed to take up all your free time, but for the first time since joining Facebook, I'm actually tempted to be cold, hard cash for a sake of an imaginary game that I probably won't be playing a month from now.

Zynga, you're so evil. But I can't stop. I only need one more ribbon to finish my next quest...

FarmVille eats my brain. I say this as a tried-and-true LJer who has never used Facebook for anything other than event notices and occasional "I forgot your email address" contact.

But, yeah, FarmVille eats my brain. Thank goodness it's likely only going to be a temporary obsession. I hope.

(Must refresh page. Must see if any animals need to be rescued. Must harvest crops... Zombie Farmville Julie is zombified.)

I just found out that a bunch of people are tentatively planning to track each other at Pennsic parties... by posting to Twitter and Facebook from their cell phones.

Okay, I've got nothing against the modern world, and goodness knows I use modern technology at Pennsic. (I am a huge, huge supporter of my camp's propane-powered shower, for example, and definitely appreciate John lending me his cell phone every night so I can call Marc.)

That said, the idea of tracking other people at Pennsic by checking each other's Facebook status updates in real-time just seems really wrong somehow.

Comments, anyone? Am I alone in this?

I've been on Facebook for a while now. I don't use it very much, but I check daily to see if I've got any new messages or friend requests. Frankly, I'm really frustrated with the whole system. If I were in charge of making interface changes, here's what I'd do:

- Include an option to turn off application notifications in my homepage feed. I don't use applications and really don't care who added "send hotness" or "compare me." Some days, applications are half my feed.
- Allow users to scroll back through the feed. I've got so many friends, who post so frequently, that if I don't check every 8-12 hours, I'll miss stuff. (I *don't* check every 8-12 hours, but that shows how disinterested I am in the whole thing.)
- Have a way to filter friends, both on my feed and my profile. Sometimes, I only want to read about my school friends, my sci-fi friends, or my sca friends. Sometimes I'll write a note that's I only want to send to certain people. IMO, this is one of the great strengths of livejournal.
- Include groups on my feed. I'm currently a member of 22 groups, and no updates from any of them will ever show up on my feed. If I want to know if something new happened in any of them, I've got to check them manually.
- Include a way to manage my messages: folders would be nice, but tags at the very least. I don't want to hunt through five pages of messages to find the one I want.
- Make users able to join more than one regional network at a time. If I'm a native Montrealer living in Toronto for a year (as I was in 2005-6), I can *either* be part of the Montreal network OR the Toronto one. Why can't I be both?

Okay, that's enough ranting for now. Don't get me wrong, Facebook does *some* things well. On the whole, though, I prefer my LJ.