Before I get too much grief, I’m fully aware that I’m about six months too late to start jumping on the slam-Facebook-bandwagon, but it’s starting to annoy me so much I can’t hold in my stored-up anger any longer.

It’s not even that I want to use Facebook or even have an opinion about Facebook. The fact is, I have to use the darn thing if I want to keep on communicating with my brother.

It all started innocently enough. After an initial flurry of activity with Facebook about a year ago, over the months I started to use it less and less. Until just a matter of weeks ago, I’d pretty much given it up. Didn’t touched it for a month. But then I phoned my brother and he revealed he was still waiting for me to play my move on Scrabble.

And so it began. Now, Scrabble on Facebook is our main means of communication - I should point out that he lives in Campbeltown, a day’s travel away no matter how I do it.

Which would be a problem, except my month-long period of time away from Facebook has made it all too clear to me that it has a problem: it isn’t good enough.

For a start, it’s slow. Agonisingly so at times. I realise it’s gearing up for a facelift that promises to simplify things and make everything wonderful again, but from the comments I’ve seen from people who’ve actually used it (along the lines of “Aaaarggghh! Bring back the real Facebook!”) I’m not holding out too much hope on that front.

Second, it’s laid itself open to all sorts of abuse. Anyone can write an application in Facebook (if you’ll forgive my terrible hypocrisy, we’re running a four-part feature about doing exactly that in PC Pro magazine) and many do. And they’re generally appalling, as well as being horribly invasive.

Third, the adverts are so low-rent they make my old university dwellings look like the Four Seasons.

Fourth, my wall being spammed by someone who thinks it’s reasonable to post stories from the website he writes for every day (don’t worry, I’ve now de-friended him). Or even the fact that when the otherwise lovely Stuart Turton comments on his photos, every single blasted one of those comments is added as a new post on my wall too!

And finally, perhaps the most crucial, it’s not very good at any one thing - aside from that thing it was originally designed for, being a social network. Flickr is much better at sharing photos; emails are far superior if you want to actually communicate anything concrete with your friends; and dedicated websites are surely the obvious place to use an application?

Take Scrabble. The real Scrabble, that is, which is now - and I surprise myself by saying this, as it was appalling at first - better than Scrabulous. To play Scrabble against my brother, I’ve got to rely on Facebook’s servers to be working that day - which frequently they’re not.

Wouldn’t it be far better for me to head to www.scrabble.com and play it there? Like-minded Scrabble lovers could come along, we could set up a league even, and when my brother and I fancied playing a game we’d be able to access it in one click - rather than the five or so it currently takes on Facebook.

But if you actually head over to Scrabble.com you’ll find it’s a pretty dull place. There’s a selection of three games designed, it seems, for two-year olds with attention disorders - zap letters to make words, play Hangman, move a snake around a Scrabble board - but no sign of Scrabble proper. Most of the site is dedicated to promoting the physical products.

And that’s why, for now, I’m still heading to Facebook every night. And still getting irritated by it every night too. But at least I get to vent my frustration at my brother.

Tags: facebook, scrabble

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 7:51 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.