When I post stuff to this website or Twitter it’s intended for “everyone” to read — granted, in actuality no one reads it, but that’s another story. Both are public mediums that any John or Jane Doe can pull up and enjoy, especially the Janes’ — high-o! However, when I post stuff to Facebook it’s intended for a very small number of people, in some case only a handful. I’ve set privacy settings on Facebook to reflect this. Why should I allow “everyone” into that circle?

It seems the “everyone” privacy setting is really just intended for the true narcissists and the friend-whores. I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t care about your party pictures from last weekend and neither does your future potential-boss or the kid down the street (well, he might, depends where you live I guess), so please don’t share them with everyone.

And come on Facebook, could you have picked a more awkward wording for this ad? In an age where identity thieves are everywhere, do you think I’d really be willing to share my identity with you? Is Social Security Number going to be a new profile box? How about mother’s maiden name? You want my kidney too?

This week Facebook began rolling out another new layout to it’s various users and I finally joined the party yesterday. My initial reaction was a simple one, Facebook want’s to be Twitter. The new newsfeed looks eerily similar to Twitter’s simple design. Replace Facebook’s new “What’s on your mind?” with Twitter’s “What are you doing?” and you might not be able to tell them apart. This isn’t by any means a bad thing. Twitter’s design is simple and easy to follow, so copying it for Facebook’s purposes makes sense.

Facebook actually does Twitter one better by threading comments (Twitter would call them replies) inline. This connects conversations and makes stalking your friends — because that’s really what Facebook’s purpose is — much easier. What’s odd, though, is Facebook’s implementation of wall posts. Instead of having some sort of threaded conversation, like the comments, wall posts are indicated by a little triangle pointing at who the post was directed towards. Giving commented posts and wall posts vastly differing designs seems odd and they don’t seem to mesh well together. Perhaps over time that aspect of the design will flush out.

The other thing Facebook significantly changed in this round of redesigns is their sidebar. What used to be a massive hodgepodge of separated boxes containing all sorts of information is now a more streamlined version of itself. Why the first “story” in the list is larger than the rest seems a bit strange, but the rest of the layout is nice. You can quickly see what groups people are joining, notes they are writing, etc. Note the empty space between the first and second story is due to my ad-blocking script. Normally that space would be filled with some annoying add asking you whether you like it or not — as if any advertisements are liked. But I digress.

The final major change this time around isn’t really aesthetic, though it effects the aesthetics of the site. It’s the filters and the privacy options. Finally the Friend List feature comes in handy. Not only can Friend Lists be used to control what information certain groups of people are allowed to see on your profile, they can now be used to easily control what information you see on your news feed. Since clicking on these Friend List filters produces a hard url rather than a dynamic page, you can change your Facebook bookmark to one such filter to control what you see when visiting the site. It’s a great way to control what information you see. Granted, if you visit someone’s profile, or picture, or anything else on the site and then return to the homepage filters will be rest to the general News Feed one.

Another way to control what information you see in the feed are the little “x” boxes that show up next to each post while the mouse hovers over them. This is a great new feature. Click the x and you’ll never see updates in the news feed from that person again. It’s a thing of beauty really. Gone are the odd sliders that didn’t seem to really effect the feed at all and, frankly, this is a much better option.

Last August Facebook redesigned for the sake of redesigning. This time around they actually redesigned for the sake of functionality. Based on Twitter comments and Facebook status people aren’t currently too fond of this new transition though perhaps it’s just the initial shock of the change. This update seems to be smartly implemented and, in a time when Facebook seemed to be getting a lot of bad press, this is actually a good move on their part.

Do you agree that the new Facebook doesn’t suck at all? Or do you feel like I’m completely coming out of left field? Let me know in the comments.

25 Random Things…

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you (thanks s-rod). If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people [in the right-hand corner of the page], then click Publish.)

1. My favorite movie is currently Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
2. I have never in my life been to the armpit of the country, also known as New Jersey and I certainly wasn’t born there.
3. Despite what you may think, Windows ME is the greatest operating system ever released.
4. If I were into cosplay, I’d totally be Dr. Horrible — before he joined the Evil League of Evil though.
5. Kristin Wig is hi-freaking-larious.
6. I’m just not that into you.
7. I’ve read all of the Twilight series and New Moon was my favorite.
8. I can’t believe it’s not butter.
9. I once threw a standardized test because the teachers said it wouldn’t count for anything and that the results would be used to set FCAT standards.
10. This page intentionally left blank.
11. I think things are a lot funnier than the really are.
12. I used to read Dave Berry like it was crack cocaine.
13. There is no thirteenth story.
14. If a movie were to be made about my life, I’d want either Shia LaBeouf or Keanu Reeves to play me. Woah!
15. I’ve never seen a movie I truly hated.
16. I really don’t think Berry Bonds is all that bad of a guy and the fact that he used steroids shouldn’t keep him or his records out of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
17. I’m having a lot of fun writing this.
18. I cried at the end of Shawshank Redemption.
19. Fallout 3 is the greatest video game ever created followed closely by Grand Theft Auto 4.
20. [Insert witty quip here.]
21. I think the writing on SNL is way better than it was just 4 years ago.
22. Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray have a lot to do with my desire to travel to Japan.
23. If I could have anyone read this list, it’d be you.
24. If I won the lottery, the first thing I’d do would be to pay off my debt, then buy a MacBook Pro, and then have all the children of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace.
25. Everything you have read here is completely true.

That’s it. Hope you enjoyed my list of 25 random things that are completely mostly false. Oh yeah, I have to tag people. Well, tag, you’re it.

Don’t get me wrong, the “change the world” bit is catchy, but just how exactly is working for Facebook going to do anything other than make it easier for people to know every waking detail of each others lives?

You might be saying “but that Greenbook application is saving the planet!” It sounds nice, but I still can’t believe that installing some lame application will save a forrest. But that’s just me.

Faces
I’ve got to say this was a feature a long time coming. Tagging someone in the keywords of a photo is one thing, but actually tagging their face is another entirely. iPhoto ‘09 allows you to do just that but takes it one better, it uses some sort of facial recognition algorithm to connect pictures based on who is in them. At least that’s the theory.

In actuality, iPhoto seems to detect about 75% of faces. This percentage is very good in my opinion. The system has no trouble at all finding faces in portraits/close ups but in candid or group shots it’s a bit spotty. If the subject is wearing a hat, glasses or even has hair in front of their face sometimes the system doesn’t recognize the face. What iPhoto doesn’t do all that well is figure out who’s in the picture.

Over the last week I’ve gone through the 10 or so years worth of pictures in my library and have tried to tag the faces of most of the pictures in there. This has resulted in nearly 150 different people, each with somewhere from 2 or 3 pictures to a whole lot. On average I’d say each ‘face’ has about 10 to 15 images. Now I don’t know if it’s because there are a lot of different people or not enough source material for each person, but I’d say iPhoto only gets about 25% of the facial recognition correct. I will say that the first person I trained iPhoto to recognize was me (is that conceited or what?) and after tagging 3 or 4 photos, it was able to find a dozen or so more and so on.

In theory the system is awesome and perhaps as I give it more input it’ll get better, but the facial recognition just isn’t quite where I’d hoped it would have been. I’m not sure if the technology behind the recognition is something that could be updated through Software Update, but it’d be interesting to see if Apple improves upon it in the future.

Places Map

Finding locations is pretty easy and there’s a fair amount of default locations built in — all cities and a good amount of landmarks/points of interest. Adding additional locations is just as easy and uses a Google Maps search engine. If that doesn’t find what you’re looking for, you can always just drag the pin where you want it to go.

It’ll be interesting to see how the map grows as I take more pictures with accurate GPS location information, and not just tag with the generic city location.

Location of individual picture.

Online Sharing
Newly integrated into iPhoto is the ability to easily upload and share photos on Facebook and Flickr. It is a very easy process, select photos and pick which service to use. The first time you use each service you have to activate each account — it takes about 30 seconds. Once everything is up and running, sharing the photos is dead simple.

One thing I was interested in was the advertised two-way communication between iPhoto and Facebook with respect to Faces tagging. According to Apple, if you tag a face in iPhoto and upload to Facebook, it’s already tagged. Likewise, if someone tags a photo in Facebook it transmits that to iPhoto. All of this works as advertised except for one feature that you would think would be standard.

When I upload a photo that has been tagged with a face in iPhoto it does tag that photo in Facebook. However, it doesn’t determine if that name is a friend or not so it doesn’t actually link to their account. For example, I tagged a photo of me in iPhoto and when it was uploaded it was tagged but in name only. Couldn’t click on my name to view my profile, etc. It was the same with all the photos I uploaded. If I tagged them in Facebook and re-synced with iPhoto, I was given the “Is this so and so” confirmation. It seems that’s the best way to go about this. Kind of a silly extra step, but one that seems necessary for it all to work properly.

The only other glitch I found here was when I tried to delete a shared album with Flickr. It showed the progress bar, but nothing happened. I quit out and restarted iPhoto and then tried again and it worked — in iPhoto. When I pulled up Flickr the pictures were all still there. I had to delete them using Flickr’s “organize” feature. Again, a strange hassle.

Final Thoughts
So is it worth it? Well, there are some things I was disappointed in, but for the most part I’m pretty happy with iPhoto ‘09. I wish the Faces technology was a bit more refined, but it’s made up for in the Places feature. I’d like to see how future updates and Apple’s infamous “bug fixes” effect iPhoto’s usability. I feel like it’s a good basis to start from and it should continue to grow from here.

iPhoto is a part of iLife ‘09 and sells for $79 (or a little less through Amazon — and I get a small kickback). Over the next few days weeks I’ll go through iLife’s other apps of note, GarageBand and iMovie, and review them as well.

What I find pretty funny is the search terms people use to find the article. On the right is a snippet from the site stats here showing 18 recent search engine results that lead to articles on this site. Out of the 18 search terms shown, 14 involve the words “new Facebook sucks.” I guess people are searching this exact phrase looking for people to agree with, or maybe they’re looking for reasons why people think this way. One thing I know for a fact is that no one in the Facebook office searched these terms to find out exactly what people are thinking.

Since the new design has gone fully live I’ve noticed a few other things that bother me. The first is the implementation of Applications. When the design switched over I noticed that there were two applications on my profile that I didn’t know I still had installed. So, I pulled up the Applications page to remove them. Before, there was a simple “remove” link to click. Now, the Applications page has numerous tabs with labels that don’t really make sense. Clicking “remove” on one tab doesn’t remove the application from the other tabs. In order to remove the application in question I had to click half a dozen times to get through all the options and actually remove the app. What a joke. This is probably the single worst effect of the new “design.”

Another thing, that I found more funny than anything, is the updated “People You May Know” box on the front page. I like that they’ve added a line to tell you why you might know the person, but what gets me is how broad the qualifier is. For example:

First of all, I don’t know anyone named Armando but the qualifier here is that we both live in Orlando. According to 2007 statistics, Orlando has over 277,000 people. Evidently because we both live here Armando and I should know each other. This new feature has potential, if Facebook can narrow the qualifier down to something like graduating class. However, based on Facebook’s lack of attention to input from the first go around, I’m not going to hold my breath.

All in all I’ve found myself visiting Facebook less over the last few days and opting more for the iPhone version, which now makes more sense then the web version. Are you visiting Facebook less? What is it that still irks you about the new design? Let me know in the comments.

If you’re a member of Facebook you might have noticed the bar atop every page lately announcing the “new Facebook.” If you haven’t clicked “try it now” then you should, just to see what a horrible mess the whole thing is. If you’re not that adventurous then just keep reading and see what you’re not really missing.

The first ting you see when you pull up the new Facebook is a modified stalker news feed. This is, of course, where all of your friends updates can be found. It’s also the location of my first gripe. If you notice in the picture below, there is a large amount of whitespace surrounding profile pictures in the news feed. The profile pictures are so far away from the text it’s almost as if they’re not associated at all. On a positive note, the right hand sidebar is leaps and bounds better then the current implementation.

What's with all the whitespace?

Another issue I have can be found on a profile’s photos page. A person’s photo galleries have been moved to the bottom of the page, below ‘photos of’ that person (which is a collection of photos added by others that tag the person in question). It’s odd that the designers chose disorder over order here. The galleries should be at the top, or at the very least along the side. Also, notice the large amount of whitespace on the right side of the page. Granted, that is probably where an annoying ad goes but when ads are turned off it’s a gaping hole in the page.

What's with the disorganized photos page?

My final, and largest complaint, lies with people’s individual profile pages. Facebook has broken the profile pages into a number of tabs (Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes). Boxes is a very odd place to store all those crappy applications that should be done away with completely. Photos is mentioned above. Info is, well, exactly what it sounds like. The problem I have is with the main tab, Wall. The current Facebook Wall is the place to exchange messages with other people. Now the Facebook Wall is that and the profile’s mini-feed. That’s right. They’ve been combined into a very confusing, horribly implemented hodge podge of information overload. Grated, there are different filter buttons to get just what you’re looking for, but why should you have to do that? The two things don’t make sense together.

Did you really think it was a good idea to combine the mini feed with the wall?

Generally change is a good thing. Though Facebook seems to be changing for the sake of changing which is a very bad thing. The layout and design all scream FriendFeed, which is about as terrible a UI as I’ve seen on the internet in a long while. I guess Facebook decided to redesign things since MySpace recently did the same, but really, why should they care what MySpace is up too? I hope Facebook is paying attention to user complaints because I know I’m not alone in my thoughts.

Or am I? Let me know what you think about the new Facebook in the comments below.

Back in college AIM (and later Trillian) was an everyday staple, constantly running providing a never-ceasing connection to just about everyone I knew. Around the end of my college years, maybe 2005ish, the slow, quiet death of IM began, when a mobile version of AIM came out. It functioned using text messages… which basically defeated the purpose of AIM and only pointed out that text messaging was a far more effective means of communication. Widespread text messaging use provided a constant, always-there connection. Around the same time AIM away messages were slowly being replaced with Facebook status updates. These, along with a few other variables (perhaps a full-time job?) lead to the eventual neglect of instant messaging.

Then came Twitter. I have talked about Twitter before and not exactly in the highest of lights, but since my last rant on their service it’s gotten much, much better in both usability and uptime. When using the @reply system, Twitter is basically instant messaging 2.0. It’s a constant, always-on connection to not just friends but the entire world through pretty much ever medium imaginable: web, text messaging, mobile clients, desktop clients, and yes, even desktop instant messaging clients. It basically takes the original AIM concept to the next level.

So I guess instant messaging isn’t dead per se, but rather it’s evolved away from a simple desktop client to multiple methods of communication that isn’t limited in any way. It’ll be interesting to see what the next iteration of instant messaging will be.

I’ve been involved with a few 2.0’s for quite a long, long time. I joined Facebook (feel free to poke me) back in late 2004, when Florida State was first added to their allowed networks. I had managed to avoid the MySpace craze, and the Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc, etc but fell hard for Facebook. There was something about it’s exclusivity and the fact that everyone I knew joined at the same moment, and then friends at other schools joined as they were added.

After Facebook I joined some other 2.0 sites with waning interest. What this really means is that I’ve got barely updated, hardly used profiles all over the internet including Digg, where I have a total of nine dugg stories in two and a half years; Flickr, which is used as a place to store a few private pictures and some others that won’t upload to my website for whatever reason; and YouTube, where I have videos I’ve created for the youth group. I have also been an on-again-off-again user of Last.fm and LinkedIn, but my interested in each of those really depends on how bored I am. I tend to sign up for various sites when I hear about them (see Skydeck) and then forget about them altogether.

When the Twitter craze began about a year ago I ignored it. I figured the same purpose was accomplished through my Facebook status. I didn’t understand why anyone other then my friends would want to know what I was doing (sometimes I don’t think my friends want to know either). It all seemed a bit strange to me. I resonate more with Tycho’s take on Twitter then some of the other internet personalities who swear by it.

Perhaps my take on Twitter is really my take on the “social web” in general and explains my basic lack of using it completely, save Facebook. It seems like a great tool, something that will really be a great thing to sign up for and use, and then just never becomes worth my time. So, instead of making connections and being “social” I’ve left fractured pieces of my identity all over the internet. I’m sure a psychologist could make some deep insight on my personality based on that statement.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the concept of web start-ups and think a lot of the ideas are pretty cool, which is why I usually jump on board initially. Maybe I’m lazy. I don’t know. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll suddenly “get” Twitter, or I’ll find a need to heavily use Flickr or the other social sites. I’m not really sure if that will actually happen, but who’s to say it won’t. If I do, I’ll be sure to integrate it here.