Facebook Alien

I have spent the last month or so researching social media sites and I have set up many without an issue.  All except one.

Flickr, Blogger, WordPress, YouTube, Twitter, AudioBoo and many others are all fairly straightforward.  They are intuitive to set up and easy to understand but Facebook leaves me stone cold.

I have tried several times now to engage with Facebook but it is confusing, unintuitive and throws me at every turn. I now have three books which I hope with help me understand the basics.  The worrying thing is that those who regularly seem to use Facebook seem blissfully unaware of how it actually works.  They just seems to ignore all the buttons, links and tabs and just use the bit they are familiar with.  I all sounds a bit like the way people generally use Word and Excel.  Just get it to print a page of text or add up a column of numbers and ignore 98% of the functionality.

I would be happy to treat Facebook like this but with concerns about privacy and data protection, you cannot afford to ignorant of the many buttons, settings, links and tabs on offer.  It is a design and interface nightmare - surely it is time for someone to design something much better, without all those awful adverts and which can incorporate powerful features but still retain an elegant and simple design and interface.

Facebook then is a bit like SMS texts. Awkward and badly designed but both destined to become massively popular despite the flaws.  Once a monster is rolling, it is difficult to stop however scary it is!