So I recently finally went ahead and got onto the Facebook bandwagon because people kept bugging me about it ;-) (among other reasons), of which I had been trying to stay away from since 2003 when Facebook didn’t allow me to register after I lost my college email due to dropping out.

While it is a nice open system with lots of things to do and some fine grained control, it has a lot to be left desired. While the privacy controls is kind of OK, it could be much much more fine tuned (and the most recent privacy update barely helped that out, if not making things worse).

The thing that has frustrated me the most though is trying to make my own Facebook applications. The documentation and its organization is TERRIBLE (often outdated), and there are so many functions the API just won’t let you do (a lot of stuff with photos, for example). The FQL (Facebook Query Language, like SQL) language doesn’t even let you do updates/inserts of information, just gathering of information (SELECT statements). One part that really pushed me over the edge on the decision to not work with it however is that it looks like it’s constantly being updated and “refined”, with aspects being added or depreciated so often, that it’s just not worth dealing with (though I have to admit I haven’t worked with it long at all, so don’t really have a good sampling ^_^; ). It’s no fun making an application and then having to reprogram it months later just because Facebook can’t get their act together. While reprogramming wouldn’t be a big deal, most likely, I have a thing about going back to old code and updating it unless I did something wrong or want to add a new feature.

While I would still recommend the site to people on general principal (not that everyone isn’t already on it), as it is nicely laid out with most things people need to stay in touch, it’s still not nearly as refined as it should be for the sheer user-base size and scope of the website.