It has been a year since I became part of the interconnected crowd at Facebook (FB). I can still recall the joys of my first night on FB. In the span of a few hours, I was back in touch with many of the old friends from elementary through high school, whom I believed I would never hear of again; this was a belief deeply rooted in my subconscious, mixed with hopeless nostalgia, and the product of years of making and having to lose or leave friends. I took part in the reunion of a lifetime, a reunion taking place only for me, and for it, I didn’t even leave my chair. When I finally gathered the drive to shut down the computer and lie down, sleep was impossible with all the excited cells in my body taking all the peace away (this is not an exaggeration). Yes, it was an exciting experience — now a wonderful memory of the past — and FB made it possible.
As I look at my friends list, I see the bits and pieces of my history. Before joining FB, those pieces were separated and all over the place, they had nothing in common but me, who did a good job at keeping each away from the other thinking it was the obvious thing to do. FB became the tool that helped me merge the past and present, gathering all the faces that I portrayed, and the roles that I played, all under a single profile — that of Pardis Noorzad.
Having said that, I feel I should go through some minor user experience design problems that in my opinion, need to be addressed by the FB development team. They are enumerated below (in no particular order):
