Facebook is, essentially, a Content Management System. (CMS) Only it is a really, really, extraordinarily bad content management system. Its search function is rudimentary to say the least. There is little categorization and even less user generated categorization. It is almost impossible to find something from the past.
To large degree this is because Facebook’s engineers are obsessed with making the interface impossible to automate. Any script you might like to have such as “accept all” (friend requests) or “delete all” (messages) is reverse engineered so as not to work. It stops people like me from making so many false accounts and conducting experiments to some degree. Which means the user has to jump through all sorts of unnatural hoops to get anything done. “Who cares? Isn’t Facebook just for wasting time and socializing?” Well, yes, but even when socializing, some of us like to maintain a higher level of discussion.
Case in point. Surprise, surprise, Lance Armstrong was doped. Where are those discussion I had about this topic a couple of years back? Who was that friend that insisted I was being extreme? Whether I am simply a pedantic friend, or someone actually looking for an old joke in my status updates, this is a practically impossible task right now. I would have to scroll down my wall for a very very long time and then use my browser’s “search” capabilities. Depending on the kind of search this would be either difficult or impossible. Multifactorial searches out of the question. I can’t ask Facebook things like “probably a year ago, a female friend of a friend commented on something I wrote about homeopathy. What was the name of the substance she recommended?”
It may seem petty or minor to you. Some psychological deficiency of mine personally maybe that makes me want to make these things clear all the time. Or a hypersensitivity to long term trends which I am always searching for. I studied theory of knowledge at university and tend to make an extra effort to calculate long term odds for anything I see. Cycling is of course “one of those sports” which is more susceptible to doping. If you don’t see the point of such functionality, you were probably not around when Zuckerberg announced he wants us all to use Facebook as our digital life store. Well Mark, do you mind if I organize mine a bit better than you? It does seem that your main concern is making money and mine would be finding my stuff.
