Freelance Unbound

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Journalists need to get to grips with social media – and especially the world’s inexplicably most-popular site, Facebook.
But Facebook sucks. It’s not just its hateful approach to individual privacy. It’s the fact that it’s such a complete pig to use – if you want to have some control over what you are doing and achieve anything useful.
Here are the top 10 things I hate about Facebook. What are yours?

1. Apps require you to let them have access to every bit of your personal information, including your friends, before they’ll let you even see what they do
2. You can’t favourite a page to more than one Facebook page at a time
3. Managing updates. It’s a pain switching from profile to page – especially in third-party sites. It’s very easy to post the wrong content in the wrong place, often twice
4. Lots of services won’t let you post content to a page (eg iPhoto)
5. You can sign in to Facebook as your page, which should make things easier. But if you are using Facebook as your page, it screws up your sidebar widgets in WordPress, which think you aren’t logged in. Or something
6. Order, order! The list of tools and apps on your Facebook page sidebar shuffles randomly. The one I use most – pages – won’t stay still, or at the top
7. How hard is it to import an RSS feed? It’s buried somewhere in “Notes” – completely unintuitive
8. Facebook’s Help pages suck. I have to find people’s Squidoo tutorials via Google to get any real information. Facebook’s tutorials assume you have never heard of the site (“Click the ‘Like’ button to ‘Like’ something'”) or know exactly how everything works in the first place
9. Which gallery am I uploading pictures to? Am I commenting on my image? Or captioning it? Jesus – counter-intuitive much
10. Apps, again – uh, where are they? Isn’t there some kind of listing somewhere? And why can I only get to Apps from my personal profile, not my page? Facebook – you suck…

 

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