Today seems to have been surrounded by “Facebook stinks” posts, on Facebook ironically. This is because of several radical changes they made over the last few days, and they are due to make more radical changes as they steam forward to F8.

I wrote this in response to a friend who commented that he liked the changes. It must be noted he is by far in the minority (at least on my Facebook feed)…

The issue is that people use facebook to read shite and chat to buddies from school, college, work, etc.

Facebook’s changes remove a lot of that and starts applying importance to posts as well as adding UI tweaks inspired by OS9 (i.e. horrid things). This confuses people because they never used “lists”, never used FB to get news and couldn’t give a crap about what their friends are doing on the site. And these people are, I would guess, the vast majority of users.

Couple that with the fact that everything being done is a huge, blatant rip off of G+ and you get the odd issue where the big nerds and web heads are calling FB out for ripping Google off, while their core userbase (i.e. the ones clicking ads) is getting confused.

It smacks of desperation from Facebook in an attempt to catch up before G+ goes nuts – i.e. today when Google added a huge arrow to the homepage to get people in the G+ door!

Now someone I greatly respect, Vint Cerf, who currently masquerades as Google’s chief internet evangelist has passed comment. Of course, anything he says must be taken with the disclosure that he is employed by Google, but his opinion matters because it’s thanks to him in no small part that we have the internet.

At an event run by The Guardian he commented that Facebook are at risk of becoming the next AOL or IBM. By that he means AOL and IBM always pushed proprietary, walled-garden approaches to software and networking. He’s a big fan of “open”. It didn’t take long for communities to break free of those walls and go elsewhere. I’m not sure how Google+ is different to Facebook in that regard, but Facebook’s business model certainly is under legitimate attack with comments like that.

Cerf argued that his feed on Facebook is rubbish. Like mine, his is filled with stuff that doesn’t matter. Google+ pushes active information up, assuming activity == interestingness. Of course that’s flawed because Scoble-spam defeats the purpose of it. 1000 comments on a photo of a horse isn’t interesting either, but I imagine Google will improve their algorithmic structures to include what I “+1″ in future, much like Digg. More than this, though, Google+ lets you sort content with circles. Yes, Facebook has “lists” but that was an afterthought that no one used. This is why one of the slew of new updates to FB include automatically sorting your lists (e.g. I have “DIT” and “Work”, but it’s flawed because a lot of my “DIT” list include people I’m friends with but never knew in DIT). Being an afterthought means it’s too much work for me to manage!

Either way, the pressure is very seriously on Facebook for F8. The pressure is on the good folks at Facebook to innovate rather than renovate in a keeping-up-with-the-Googles way. The heat is also on Mark Zuckerberg to perform well. I would argue the pressure for F8 is greater than the pressure Tim Cooke will have at the next Apple presser.