Minnesota, USA May 9, 2011- Even though it may just be our imagination, Facebook makes changes to its website often. From a business stand-point, it is wise to experiment with tools in order to ensure the optimal customer experience. Unfortunately, Facebook is picking out parts of its website that worked well for most people. Perhaps these changes you barely noticed; however, everything is magnified in my experience due to the use of nearly every feature. I cannot guarantee there will be changes to fix the 'problem' areas that Facebook created, but I can tell you ways to cope or change the ways you do activities on Facebook to complement your expectations.
When opening up a lengthy message that consists of several replies, it requires extensive scrolling. What is the problem The fact that it was like this for as long as I can remember! I understand that Facebook may have the intention to help 'remind' people of their past interactions; however, it should also realize that people can look back to the most recent message and instantly know everything said. We do not need to go through all the messages. One word of advice to Facebook: consistency. If regular posts and News Feed show up with the latest news on the top, the private messages should also appear in this way.
In the meantime, the only advice to give Facebook users is to cut back on the replies in a message. Instead, create a new message and paste the last post below the reply (to remind friends). The message box could look cluttered when doing this, so delete clusters of messages as they are not needed.
Comments on Photos of Tagged Friends Denied
It may be related to privacy settings which everyone is increasing as they become available; a photo of a friend may be tagged by someone who is not a friend which completely prevents us from being able to comment. It is frustrating especially in the instances where you have something specific to say, but do not know the other person enough to add him or her as a friend.
Unfortunately, there is no known way to get around this. If you want photo comments open to all of your friends, you can download the photo and upload it again so that friends do not need to have this frustration - this does not do anything for making comments on others' photos unless you promote this idea.
Privacy Changes
It is a common compliant that Facebook changes its options on privacy without telling its users; it leads to information being revealed until users increase the settings again. Although the reason for the 'hush' on changes is unknown, I suspect that it would like as much information as possible viewable by others. In the beginning, most people did not care if the public could view their profiles, but our views changed since then.
The only action to protect oneself is to be familiar with all settings in Facebook and check back about once a week. I highly recommend customized settings because there is more awareness on who can view what; in addition, it allows users to make exceptions.
News Feed
By default, Facebook creates 'Top News' and 'Recent News' based on who interacts most with whom. In my eyes, it causes those people to interact even more and leave the other friends' updates in the dust. The 'Recent News' option is deceiving in this way; most people believe that they are truly watching the posts that came up most recently.
To fix this, click on the 'Recent News' arrow which expands; select 'Edit Options' and change the 'show posts from' from 'friends and pages you interact with most' to 'all of your friends and pages.'
