I’m currently working on a couple projects that involve connecting the site we are working on with Facebook (FB). Even though we have looked at FB over one of the girls’ shoulders, neither Andrea nor I had signed up.

For the most part it seems FB has taken functionality that exists elsewhere on the Internet and bundled that functionality together into a single site. On FB, you can share pictures like flickr or photobucket, you can post & comment like a blog and you can have friends and privacy filters like LiveJournal based sites.

As far as the privacy and filters part of it goes, if you put it on the Internet, it isn’t private. If it’s a picture it gets downloaded to every computer that shows it in a browser. So, I would not put anything on FB that I would not put either on my blog or flickr. If I wanted to say something to you privately, I’d send you an email or call you on the phone.

Now for the review:

I did sign up earlier this week so that I would have an account to test with. The signup went around in circles and kept coming back to the same screens until I clicked skip on all of them. Poking around my profile after I signed up, I found that it had collected all of the info I had provided. So, I had to delete all of the duplicate information. Strictly from a programmer’s perspective, a site reputed to have in excess of 100 million users ought to be able to get a simple signup process in place that works.

By about a day after I had signed up, I had received somewhere in the range of 30 to 50 email from FB. After the second batch of them showed up, I created a mail filter to dump the FB email into a folder so that it didn’t take over my inbox. When I had a few minutes, I went back and poked around some more to see if there was someplace where I could turn notices off. I was blown away to see that there were two screens worth of types of notices that FB sends. If you haven’t guessed already, I turned them all off.

The other annoyance I found with FB is the ads. Not that FB has ads, but the type of ads that I get. When I first noticed that I was getting dating site ads, I went through my profile to see where I could change the setting to say I was married (I did learn something about FB looking over the girls’ shoulders). Despite the fact that I’ve indicated I’m married, nearly every page view has at least one singles and/or dating site ad. Folks, it isn’t that hard to add a little logic to show people ads that reflect what they’ve told you about themselves.

The one positive note I have on the experience is that I did get to catch up with some folks that I haven’t seen in a few years.

A bit on the technology:

I haven’t used FB on dialup, but I expect that once you were actually in the site, it would work fairly well for you and be reasonably responsive. In fact, I suspect that they have put a fair amount of effort into making it so that it does work decently on dialup since a fair chunk of the world’s population doesn’t have ultra high speed connections.

One of the methods typically used to make sites more dynamic is called AJAX. The way AJAX increases the dynamic/interactive nature of a site is to send requests to the server and bring back small portions of updates to the screen that you are currently using. As long as it is done carefully, AJAX gets the most bang for the buck over dialup. The reason for that is that the main limiting factor in dialup is the volume of data. So, for small blocks of data, dialup is not that much slower than your typical high speed internet connection.

The place where AJAX kind of sucks is over satellite (which is what we have). Communicating over satellite involves a delay (called latency). The way that satellite technology compensates for that delay is by delivering data in large volume which works with most applications. If AJAX breaks updates to the page into several low volume requests, updating the page takes roughly the number of requests time longer to update than if you just requested a whole new page. Although I haven’t investigated to verify it, based on how painfully slow it is when using it, I suspect FB uses a lot of AJAX calls. So, FB isn’t going to get on my frequent use list.