Timeline - Why All The Hate?

I'm with you in that I rarely spend any time on my traditional facebook page - I do find that I'm spending a quite a bit of my time on my "fanpages" or whatever their called now though as my following grows.

The look is really clean for my readers (i think), the big cover photo gives me a great opportunity for a call to action while still keeping my logo in place and if there is some stuff I want to stay at the top I can just set it as the equivalent of a "sticky" in wordpress.

My thoughts exactly. In fact, I find that Facebook's general usability goes against many design standards. I have no problem using any site on the Web, and there are many variants of navigation and functionality; but they pretty much all stick to tried & true methods of usability. Facebook, however, seems to go against a lot of that these days.

My first FB account was a few years ago, but I got out of it because it didn't really fill a need for me. But a couple months ago I got another account, and wow! They've really screwed with people. I'm keeping the account because now it's more for business purposes, but it's a PITA sometimes, and now this Timeline thing.... *shakes head*

Or maybe I'm just too old. :p

"Hate" seems like a strong word.

But before I closed my FB account I had the joy of experiencing Timeline and I'll tell you why it was off-putting for me: Timeline hides some updates.

I would go to some page where I knew there was something in particular posted -- except it wasn't there. That's especially maddening when you know someone posted a link to your site and you want to see what the context is. Did they love it? Did they find it useful?

The best way to describe everything that's wrong with FB is to contrast it with Twitter. Twitter is linear and transparent. As long as your tweets aren't protected, everybody can see a tweet in your stream. If I get traffic to Best of Fiverr from Twitter, I can tell which tweet drove it and who sent out that tweet. (Weirdly, there are people who take my RSS feed and tweet it. I have no idea why, but thanks guys anyway.)

I no longer waste my time with FB. If I get traffic from there, I ignore it.

fLufF
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Hey Jim,

Great post. I would say 99% of my friends don't like it because they just don't want to change, there might be a few with legit reasons that they've thought out but it seems like the large majority see someone post "timeline sucks" or "give me back the old facebook" and then they all just rally behind that person with "yeah!".

I think your point about separating anxiety from legitimate concern is a very good one and I don't think FB does a very good job of this at all. The whole change definitely feels like a dictatorship type move and I'm sure that's a large part why people came up so hard against it as well.

Which is why I wondered if a lot of people had actually given it an honest try or just got into the whole mob mentality of "timeline sucks!".

In all honesty I would say 99% of my facebook "friends" are just casual acquaintances at best so I haven't really bothered to probe too deep into their comments which is why I thought I would ask here as we're all a bit more "into" this sort of thing and there have been some excellent responses.

Fluff: not knowing where to find an older piece of content wasn't one I'd thought about but I thought that Timeline was going to make that easier, what with the chronological order and all?

And even more people hate pointless change. Change-for-the-sake-of-change.

Older people are often derided for being resistant to change. It's not because we're stupid or stubborn; it's because we've had a lifetime of seeing changes that were made because some job-justifying nitwit had a brain fart.

fLufF
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The timeline is pretty much designed to look like an infographic.

If done correctly, the timeline can be used to create a community around your brand's story.

I think some people don't like it because it's such a big change from the orginal Facebook design.

Eventually, people will just get used to it. It's really a great idea, but the roll out could have been handled better.

At first glance, Timeline looks cool. The wide cover image is so much easier to utilize than the long and skinny profile image of the previous format. And the two column layout 'feels' like a magazine.

But...

With the old linear display, your posts were displayed in reverse order, latest post first, and all the posts were there unless you chose to remove or hide them. With Timeline, Facebook decides if the post is important enough to be displayed. If you don't have a lot of posts, that may not be an issue. But if you are prolific, it can be annoying to have FB decide what is important and what is not.

If you get busy, and don't hangout at FB for a while, you visitors will see a lack of content at the top, and are forced to scroll down to see what you last posted. Or what FB considers important of what you last posted.

This is especially annoying with the 'fan' pages. For example, last February we lost Warrior Vanessa Reece and her son put up a memorial community page. There were hundreds of posts as people said their goodbyes to V, and consoled each other over our loss. Since Timeline, there are a relative few number of posts. It's not much of tribute to Vanessa anymore.

The same happens to business pages. Your business page could and should share valuable content you created yourself, or found and linked to on the web. Content that is just as valuable to your visitors today as it was the day you posted it. Before Timeline, that content was accessible, regardless of how long ago your last message was posted.

Since Timeline, that content is filtered by FB, and if you haven't posted in a while, your page looks abandoned, with little or no content at the beginning of the page.

IMO, cool looking or not, Timeline makes pages less relevant for all but personal use. And perhaps less relevant for personal use, as well.

The only reason I don't delete my FB account now is I still have friends that only share things like their vacation photos on FB. If I delete the account, I won't have access to that content.

The only posts you'll find on my FB page now are my Tweets on Twitter!

For what it's worth, Timeline is the only interface change that Facebook has implemented that I haven't found to be an improvement.

-Anita

I agree that people like to complain. But this isn't about complaining and adaptability. I see it as a discussion about a company that had something pretty close to perfect and they screwed it up. This has cost facebook members, lots of them. There are more than three million hits for the Google search "facebook timeline sucks."

Now they're holding firm with the new platform for whatever reason when at least giving people the option to go with the new or keep the old would be reasonable.

I see this as a lesson. A lesson called leave well enough alone.

Fluff: not knowing where to find an older piece of content wasn't one I'd thought about but I thought that Timeline was going to make that easier, what with the chronological order and all?

Nope.

Facebook doesn't show you every piece of content in Timeline.

It's absolutely appalling. You give FB valuable information and FB gives you the shaft.

fLufF
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