It’s tough to start out this by saying “when Facebook made their latest changes” because by the time I’m finished typing, something else will have changed. Makes this whole thing a bit dodgy to begin with, but then again that sums up Facebook pretty well these days, doesn’t it? Dodgy. Which makes sense because after humble beginnings, widespread adoption, and a movie… the only thing left is either a slow, painful decline or for the entire thing to crumble. Either that, or the bass player is going to be discovered dead in a cheap motel bathtub shortly before the band hits big. Sometimes I get confused on these things…

I really don’t want to complain about Facebook – honestly, I don’t. The entire service is free, keeps me in touch with folks who I’d normally be too much of a slacker to search for, and generally provides enough amusing material to be worth a laugh from time to time. The idea is good. I just wish the implementation wasn’t so absolutely gawdawful that it’s like having your doctor prescribe Drain-O for a sore throat. What was the first thing that you did when landing in your news feed? Clicked it over to “recent” – where it should have been by default the entire time. Screeds of great length were dedicated to this monument of idiocy, grievances filed, and millions basically got ticked off… and then finally made peace with it. So what does Facebook do after a year or so alone with all that feedback? They don’t even allow you to flip it over read from top to bottom – you now click and it shoots you down the page to maybe (if it’s working that day) read the most recent happenings. Of course, the entire thing is blipping downwards from time to time because the news feed piled on top of it keeps updating, but hey… imperfect world. Screws fall out. Supposedly bigger and better (read: dumber and more useless) changes are coming.

What makes this sad isn’t that Facebook is constantly screwing with their free service to make it less usable. It isn’t even the fact that they don’t care about their users because they’re actually the product being sold to everyone with a checkbook and a hankering to gain a buttload of very personal and intimate knowledge about potential consumers. It’s that one isn’t completely mutually exclusive of the other.

I use Facebook with the knowledge that my very presence on the system is being bought and sold as a commodity to some faceless corporation who will use that knowledge to one day build their own secret island headquarters in preparation to take over the world. (Maybe. I’m guessing on that one.) However, I also happen to be a slacker when it comes to keeping in contact with people, so it’s worth it to me. What’s so aggravating is that Facebook isn’t even trying to fool us about how much of a commodity we are. I mean sheesh, at least the machines tried to give Neo and the rest of mankind a perfect fake world – Mark Z and his cronies seem to be in the business only of selling information and seeing how many people they can piss off on a given day.

Of course, the irony here is that once I’m done typing this, I’ll rush over to Facebook and post a link so others can read it. Sort of like showing up to your bank protest 10 minutes early so you can deposit your check into savings. And of course something like 5 people will actually notice it because no one can actually sort out where any of their crap is anymore and we all become virtual shut-ins staring at each other through cyber drapes. Hey, I think the Anderson kid is playing Farmville again… and tipping over the garbage cans…

So why stick with it? Mostly because I missed out on MySpace and am too lazy for learning anything to do with Google Plus. Or +. Or whatever it’s called. Damn I feel old just typing this. Whatever. Which all means that when everyone has moved on to slobber over their new Google overlords and perhaps even what comes after that, I’ll be that one guy hanging out on Facebook. I’ll be easy to find too. Just look for the guy shooing imaginary kids off his virtual reality lawn.