The Incredibly Frustrating Facebook

Posted on | April 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment

For all its popularity Facebook remains one of the most unreliable collections of software ever released, but what I can’t figure out is why people put up with its shortcomings. Maybe the real answer is that they don’t – maybe Facebook stats don’t reflect all those who finally got fed up and stopped using the service.

Even worse are their games. I have to admit the concept is ingenious – provide free games that rely on building networks of friends to keep people on the Facebook site. But talk about not ready for prime-time, the games even though deemed beta are generally not even a decent alpha release.

These games are admittedly enticing – at least to start. In fact it was only because a friend needed more neighbors in the Farmville game that I got on Facebook. Once there I tried some other games like Caribbean Pirates, Yo-Ville, and some kind of medieval kingdom building thing, but they are mostly the same. Ended up spending time mostly on Farmville and Pirates.

While its easy to get somewhat hooked on playing, it was the never-ending performance problems that made me quit. It’s hard to tell if these issues are the result poor software design & coding, or inadequate bandwidth and throughput capability on Facebook servers. Maybe both.

The worst symptoms would be the abysmally slow response and session lockups, often requiring a cold re-boot to clear the latter. Typical would be dropped packets and lost sessions, which caused things like gifts or collectables to disappear, or the game to freeze. And then there were the arbitrary re-directs where you end up somewhere totally unexpected, or back to start. Didn’t take long to where playing just wasn’t worth the aggravation.

One might question the complaints about something that’s free, but the thing is, it’s not free. It’s an investment of time that also exposes one to their ads, and even for direct purchases within the games themselves.

The bottom line is Facebook needs to work on improving the quality of their product which basically translates into better quality control and testing of their software before release and perhaps spending some bucks on decent server farms.

In fact bandwidth is only getting more saturated, so if they’re going to play in the cloud, they need to improve their platform. I’ve no idea what they’re using, but the new routers and switches offered by Cisco Systems are quite impressive.

At the end of the day, Facebook has created clever ways of pulling folks in, but if they don’t get a handle on providing an acceptable level of service I’d expect people to start leaving in droves. Of course I could be wrong, maybe folks are more tolerant than me, but with all the complaints I’m reading, that’s hard to believe.