Facebook – is the party over?

Recently, Facebook has been playing up more and more. What used to be a nifty tool for social networking seems to be becoming increasingly an absolute pain in the neck to use. Here are just some examples that have been particularly annoying me:

Broken links: Frequently, for example, the Event link doesn’t work. This seems to be because instead of going to the normal link, ../events.php, it intercalates home.php#/. This happens all over the site, sometimes it tries to access an address /home.php#/home.php. Predictably unsuccessfully.

News feed: It frequently publishes items from sources I have chosen to hide, publishes items more than once, and publishes items as recent material which were actually posted weeks previously.

Ads: Facebook ads are pretty limited generally, with slow turnaround time for approvals, little flexibility in format, unclear targeting and poor diagnostics. But recently I noticed the possibility listed alongside a group I administer to advertise the group. I clicked on that, but not only does it not pick up and automatically fill in the link I wanted to promote – it actually appears to be impossible to promote groups at all!!! (You can promote it as if it were an outside link, like you can promote any outside link, but this seems very inelegant; you also can’t indicate that it’s a Facebook group in the text because the word “Facebook” is banned!)

It’s also interesting that for a certain range of values, the less you bid per click the more clicks it predicts you will have!

Uploads: For some reason, you can upload video files, but not audio files.

Link previews: Facebook insists on adding a preview of any link you include in the text of a status update or any other material posted to your wall/newsfeed, but unfortunately this preview is frequently worse than useless. Often it references some general statements about the site to which you link, rather than the material you are linking to (for example if you link to drop.io or tinyurls). On other occasions it previews, for reasons no one can understand, entirely different pages from the same site (for my blog, it will frequently provide a preview of a different blog post, although I use the permalink).

Mail: Why on earth is it impossible to forward messages? And why have updates suddenly become so invisible?

Friends: Why is it so difficult to manage lists?

Privacy: Why is Facebook continually trying to put, and actually putting, material in the public domain which I do not want to be there? I was very surprised to discover that my public search listing includes pages I’m a fan of and a host of other personal material that I don’t especially want to be in the front line of my Google Search listings. I hope I now fixed it, but I see more and more the default option “everyone” which, in case you didn’t realize it, actually means “the entire world (human or otherwise)”.

x.facebook.com: Facebook seems to have a host of different mobile sites with reduced functionality. Particularly reduced is this one, which for some reason is the default it opens on my phone (although m.facebook.com works no less badly).

Notifications: It frequently omits notifications, or includes them only hours (or possibly days) later (usually as if they were read) so you don’t notice them.

Any more annoyances with using Facebook? Post them here!