Tag: facebook

Facebook cleanse

Facebook & Instagram

Over the past few years, my usage of Facebook has gone down. Not because I don’t like it, but mostly because it has become my news aggregator. It used to be my friend news aggregator, but it turned into brand news aggregator. I have enough sources that are far more superior at aggregating these news types.

Anyway, this week, I changed how my Facebook looked. I had to unfollow and “unlike” a ton of Pages. This included TV shows, movies, tons of fashion brands, products etc. Now, my News Feed only shows posts from my Facebook friends. The peace is back.

At first, it felt nice and I was happy to see the posts from just my FB friends. A few hours in, I realized that these were posts from very few friends who were using it. Not a lot of my friends use or post on FB anymore. It’s the end of a beautiful era.

FB was hot and I loved it. I still do. Not a fan of the UI but nevertheless, it’s an amazing platform. I thought about what would bring back its glory. I think making a user’s News Feed focus on content from their friends would make it wonderful and personal. If a user Likes or Follows a Page, or even joins a Group, FB should make the user explicitly opt-in to include their updates in the user’s News Feed as opposed to including them by default. This would be a better UX. Even having separate tabs to show all the updates from Pages and Groups would be nice. These are the UX changes that’d make FB feel more personal again.

Right now, Instagram is all the hype. I love Instagram. Not the current one, but the original one without the Stories. It was so cool and felt so personal. Now, all I see is that the people I follow posting random re-posts of posts from accounts I don’t give a shit about. Over the past couple of years, I unfollowed so many of my friends who did this. The most critical feature of Instagram was not having this ability to re-post. Now they have it. It makes my feed terrible. I get why they want that feature, but I’m not a fan of it. It’s just bad UX.

I miss the old Facebook and the old Instagram, the fantastic networks that made more people want to use it. Neither of these platforms are simple anymore. The UX is just way too convoluted.

Move fast and Break things

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I have been thinking about implementing a lot of ideas that I’ve had since a while but never had the motivation to do so. That was mostly because I always plan on making things in a perfect way and tend to procrastinate a lot. So, perfection in my case can be dubbed as procrastination. To get rid of that, I have planned on hacking on the ideas that I’ve had and will try to complete them ASAP. Starting from today, I will pick up one idea at a time or even multiple ideas if I feel bored and hack on them. I will deploy them without waiting for my innate judgmental self to kick in and decide if the app is really worth deploying or not. The only priority for the deployment of an app would be that It Works™.

I will open source my applications one at a time so that anyone who finds my hacks interesting can contribute to them. I will also write a follow up blog post for each of these apps explaining the technology stack behind the app, the APIs used in the application and the process of building it.

I hope the information I provide helps you, inspires you and I really hope you guys enjoy using my applications as much as I do.

Latest updates

WordPress: First off, let me start off with WordPress. WordPress never fails to impress me after launching new versions of its blogging platform. WordPress 3.2 seems to be heavily loaded with awesome. This seems to be a terrific upgrade from the previous versions. There are loads of new features included in the upgrade.

  • The new Twenty Eleven WordPress theme (which is currently on my blog)
  • Lighter on the resources
  • Newly designed dashboard
  • The best part of the update: Zen mode for distraction free post writing.

**Google: **Google seems to be going crazy with the release of its new products like Google+, Google Music, WDYL etc. Google also launched 2 new versions of their new Gmail interface. Believe me, they look really clean, simple, minimalist and amazing.

Facebook: Facebook launched its Video Calling feature yesterday along with other updates such as Group Chat and newly designed chat interface. The Video Calling feature seems to be activated but the Group Chat feature doesn’t seem to be. On a lighter note, there has been an image doing rounds on Google+. I really am a huge fan of Facebook and I really don’t appreciate the image. But the image makes me really LOL. Just look at the “f” flip when the girl gets slapped. 😀

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