Partly, I’m writing because I’m bored, partly, partly in an attempt to start updating this blog, and partly because I’ve finally used facebook enough to officially be annoyed by it.
When I first joined facebook I was impressed by how much faster it seemed than myspace. It also have a much cleaner seeming interface. Even better it displays more or less correctly (including buttons working regularly), something I can’t say for myspace. But I still liked myspace better for all the bands and the messy pages that don’t look the same. Oddly enough for the site owned by Fox, it seemed a tiny bit less corporate than facebook.
Now, I’m not sure I think any of those things are true any more (except that one about preferring myspace).
First, I’ve noticed that facebook just in not that fast anymore. Maybe this is due to their growth (but as a fairly late adopter, that is hard to believe). It could be the third party add-ons. But whatever it is, the responsive interface I was getting used to is not so responsive anymore. I know you can do complex AJAX programs and still be responsive (google seems to have figured that one out).
So here is a test of ping times just to see how quickly the sites respond. This is of course totally inaccurate and stupid, but here it is anyway. You will notice that myspace and facebook have the same average time (roughly twice that of google).
john@ganon ~ $ for i in google.com myspace.com facebook.com; do ping -q -c 10 $i; done
PING google.com (64.233.167.99) 56(84) bytes of data.— google.com ping statistics —
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 49.553/51.214/53.625/1.027 ms
PING myspace.com (216.178.38.116) 56(84) bytes of data.— myspace.com ping statistics —
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 8997ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 102.313/103.110/104.222/0.609 ms
PING facebook.com (204.15.20.80) 56(84) bytes of data.— facebook.com ping statistics —
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 102.409/103.892/105.161/0.837 ms
I also have a non-speed related interface problem. When one signs in, one can click on either profile or facebook. Each link brings you to something that is almost your main page with updates that may be either important or interesting. But neither seem to actually be the main one. Having two separate main pages that you need to check if you don’t want to miss a notification seems like really bad (and obvious) design flaw.
I hope to write a little more soon about some things I’ve noticed about the friends I have listed on facebook.