facebook's desperate measures

for such a big company that boasts of gazillion-dollar value, facebook's latest barrage of feature impositions really come off as desperate.

there was facebook mail - which just turns itself on if you try to go to your messages (as in site messages, not facebook mail). what's up with that?  they introduced a feature that they know no one will like so they have to make it default?  there's also automatically the "archived" folder. excuse me, but i don't remember archiving my old messages. i deleted them. yes i did. and now they show up in the archive folder. WTF???  is this the privacy that facebook has promised? that if you delete content it's gone?  i deleted my old messages long time ago and now they're in my archived folder???  they were supposed to be gone, why were they holding on to these personal messages?  oh yeah and from the archive folders it takes 3 not-so-obvious steps to delete them again.  that is, if they really actually delete them.

then there was the chat thing.  i turned it off last year.  it was supposed to remember that it's off.  suddenly yesterday it was on again.  automatically. so i say no thank you and turned it off again.  then i thought i'd change the setting just to be sure.  turns out when you click on the chat status (where you access your setting) you automatically turn your availability on again.  whatever happened to announcing in the log-in page that they now have these "cool" features?  my guess is that either they know that these features aren't cool enough for account members to actively turn them on, or that they really are, indeed, desperate for member activities. (new york time's "tech talk" podcasted that millions of north american members are no longer active users)

it may not be just deleted messages that facebook "archives" for future use.  i once deleted an old account - email addresses, friends associated with that account, etc. and created a new one with a different email address.  after about a year i created yet another account, using the email address of the account i've deleted, to anchor a (professional) profile page to.  i still have my usual networking profile, so this one was an extra. i didn't "friend" anyone with this,  i made the privacy setting so that no one can send me friend request, nor find this account thru search.  so tell me -  how come facebook had been suggesting me to "friend" all these people that were associated with this email before?

XXX

anti-social (network) behavior

i never really saw how it's different from all its predecessors - friendster (r.i.p.), myspace (r.i.p.) etc.  it's gotten easier to publish, and there's a lot more users, of course - but surely these are brought about by tech advances in general and growing number of internet users, not groundbreaking innovations from facebook? unless of course including mindless games (farmville froze my brain at one point) counts as innovation.   anyway, as with friendster and myspace - facebook's now so full of junk it's unbelievable - and useless.  ok, not entirely useless as i can still link my website and blog posts there while waiting for the next big thing.

XXX