The Adventures of Joshua Judson Rosen
(action man)

[ sections: VisualIDs | art | movies | everything ]


Fri, 30 Oct 2009
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01:43: Trying Facebook

OK, I'm on Facebook, now.

Now that I've tried it, I feel like it's.... several hours of my life that I'm never going to get back--time that I could have spent painting, writing poetry, practicing my theremin, learning Hebrew, releasing libvisualid 0.2, playing Munchkin or weiqi or any game that's fun with someone.

I created yet another incompatible, exclusive account with yet another password to remember, jumped through the series of captchas, spent an hour figuring out how to get Facebook to import the RSS feed from the journal that I already own (and that everyone supposedly wants to read `but only on Facebook'--is my site really that ugly? You can just tell me so, if it is...), and spent even longer rummaging around in the rest of the Facebook UI to try to figure out what I was looking at at any given moment and how I was supposed to get back to the listing of information that I wanted. That latter bit... I still haven't figured out; I'm also having trouble figuring out what the differences between `notes', `messages', `posts'(?) and whatever are, which ones I have to use in which contexts, how I even get to the page for each of them....

At the end of my first day as a Facebook user, it really does seem like the correct response to "... but Facebook is FREE!" is "only if my time isn't worth anything".

But my time is worth something--and yours is, too! I'd much rather spend what little time I have actually enjoying your company than waste it fighting my way through what looks like it's just a neverending shithole of UI cruft. Seriously--come to dinner! Have an actual conversation! Be an actual real-life friend! I'll be yours! I'll cook! I'll serve you my best wine! I'll laugh at your jokes! I'll BRING PIE!

Or tell me `I'm not going to care about you unless you can pass the Facebook gauntlet', which seems all too much a long-winded version of `fuck you'.

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