Facebook is Dead. I'm Not Being Facetious
Either there's a glitch in Facebook, or else it's dead. Well, not dead, exactly, but I noticed that, at nearly 10 pm, none of my friends have done anything today to merit appearing on the News Feed of stuff (see above).
(The News Feed, for those of you with real lives, lists recent activity by your friends in adding little widgets, updating their photos, tagging other photos, and all that sort of thing that merits an evening at home.)
(And no, I'm not filtering my News Feed at all:)
(And yes, I do have some friends. Well, Facebook friends. They're like fairweather friends except they don't even hang around when the weather's good:)
Now, this could be a glitch. A glance at one of my most active Facebook chums indicated she's accepted flowers, a caveman and a fire in the past hour.)
And we should distinguish between activities and updates. Status updates are still going fine: 22 of my chums have updated their status in the last six hours. But none, as far as I can work out, have added an application, tagged photos or done anything that merits being put into the News Feed (indeed a lot of the activity in the News Feed seems to be a couple of days old.)
To me that's kind of significant. If my friends have tired of Facebook as a place to hang out and do stuff, then how long has it got left?
I can't speak for all the other fairweather friends, but what has happened in my case is that i've tightened up what goes into the feeds of all my friends and acquaintances on Facebook recently.
Facebook just launched a whole slew of new privacy features not too long ago and I decided to make full use of them to restrict what gets shown to the feeds of everyone else.
Looks like its working! :-)
Posted by: Joe Goh | April 16, 2008 at 12:23 AM
Ditto here. ~300 friends, and the most recent update is from yesterday...
Posted by: Mark | April 16, 2008 at 01:57 AM
Over the last two months I've personally noticed the exact same concerns you've addressed in your blog post. I emailed them at one time and didn't get a response (I was curious in the logic myself).
In order to test this theory on my own I've reviewed my "news feed", and then viewed the "friends > recently updated" tab to compare the differences. You'll notice that what happens is Facebook seems to cache the information. Meaning, instead of updating "news feed" in real-time, they queue the updates to happen at once.
Furthermore, "news feed" has some kind of logic coded in order (even with out filters) to choose what to place on your "news feed". There are plenty of times in which I've noticed my friends who's changes are noted within "recently updated", are not listed within my "news feed".
...just my own unscientific anecdotal observations.
Posted by: Ramsey Mohsen | April 16, 2008 at 02:24 AM
You do realize that the News Feed is widely being reported as broken right now, right?
Posted by: Teresa Valdez Klein | April 16, 2008 at 02:32 AM
Yes, I too have been experiencing these concerns. With all of the advertisement campaigns on facebook, which can be very successful if done right, I have come to the conclusion that it is an error and will be fixed soon.
Posted by: NewSunSEO | April 16, 2008 at 03:58 AM
YEAH! FACEBOOK SUCKS! SERVES THEM WELL!
Posted by: Shree Mulay | April 16, 2008 at 04:01 AM
That's because it's Spring and it's totally beautiful outside!
Posted by: Ferodynamics | April 16, 2008 at 04:05 AM
Exactly. I've noticed this over the past few months too. It's simply people putting more restrictions on what info. of theirs shows up on your News Feed. I might do a lot on Facebook in one day, but nobody will see it on their home page.
But remember the days when there was no News Feed and no home page??
Posted by: Sues | April 16, 2008 at 04:12 AM
Well you are right facebook is almost dead.. it was a hype and now people started to get bored from it as nothing interesting in fact... so all the facebook buzz will go time sooon... but other social networking like myspace will stay constant and people will continue using it because they are used to it and there is something given to them there as i believe... honestly i deactivated my facebook since like 8 months...
cheer!
ghalo
http://www.jean.ghalo.com
Posted by: Jean ghalo | April 16, 2008 at 05:10 AM
Glad to hear I'm not the only one wondering about this... when comparing Facebook to Plaxo on length of time to update...Facebook is definetly on the "not moving" side...
It'd be great to have a more real time experience - instead of the "canned" one we're getting right now...
Posted by: Sabine Pyrchalla | April 16, 2008 at 06:06 AM
Quite a few people reporting broken news feeds, so maybe the funeral should be postponed:
http://tinyurl.com/58oz27
Posted by: Jeremy Wagstaff | April 16, 2008 at 06:10 AM
I see missing stuff, and I see no voting icons. You're supposed to be able to "promote" and "demote" stuff. (The fact that they never seem to have an effect is beyond the scope of this comment.)
Posted by: Voyagerfan5761 | April 16, 2008 at 06:10 AM
God, u almost scared me out... I thought Facebook was really dead for good seeing ur title above....
Posted by: Toshihiko | April 17, 2008 at 10:32 AM
Well it's back on track, usable again, but the new chat feature is awfull, go on and leave your facebook opened for a couple hours!
Posted by: Godzhesas | April 24, 2008 at 06:49 PM
So true.
Posted by: Marisa | July 26, 2008 at 07:59 PM