news.cnet.com

My Facebook account has switched to the new home page, and of course it doesn’t fucking remember which group of friends I want to see updates from, because of course I have to be interested in what every single of my contacts has to say.

And, speaking of groups, it looks like there still isn’t any way to just list the contacts that I haven’t tagged into a group yet. Which, you know, would be somewhat convenient if I were going to actually manage them. (But, yeah, it’s kinda moot since groups still aren’t of much use.)

I have this tingling sense that Facebook’s designers know how to make cool stuff, but are more and more losing track of what made Facebook take off in the first place — the actual social aspect. It seems to me that someone who wants to focus on “charting the social graph” ought to concern themselves with making it easy to differentiate between the friends I care about and those I accepted just out of politeness and don’t wanna read about; now that everybody and their mom are on Facebook, it’s a little bit more important to the users than being notified of what people rented on Netflix.

(I know some people have been saying that for a while, but I’m only getting there now. Unless I already posted a comment to the same effect before, in which case that means I felt that way and just forgot about it. That happens. I don’t care enough about Facebook to remember what I’ve thought about it yesterday.)

One nit: Although Facebook calls it the "real-time stream," it doesn’t auto-update. You have to refresh the page to get the latest. But overall, this is a strong update for old guys like me who want their Web services simple. It puts your friends more in front of you than the old design did, and that’s what Facebook is really about.

What? Scratch the “they know how to make cool stuff,” then.