Friday, January 29, 2010

Lite's on, nobody's home

Well, I managed to get back into facebook despite their attempts to keep me out. It looks as though the problem actually originated in the DNS which I couldn't flush in my work PC (thanks a lot, IT folks - grr). Once I tried to log in from my home, I could get in and change the default to regular facebook and leave the option of switching to lite once I'm logged in.

It's a cleaner, faster interface, but I'm sure it will be changed some before it becomes the normal version - there are no ads!

At any rate, the problem is fixed (though no thanks to facebook who remain singularly silent on the customer support front).

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Angry with Facebook

That's right, I'm going to rant a bit about facebook now.

I (foolishly, as it turns out) chose to switch over to facebook lite yesterday, based on a couple other blog posts and reviews I saw. lite.facebook.com beckoned with the promise of no ads, much faster loads and all that good stuff, and I bit like a smallmouth hitting a hula popper in murky water.

My big mistake - and I admit it, this was my mistake - was in setting lite as my default mode. Now, lite.facebook is down - and has been for most of a day - and I can't get in. I found all the advice about flushing caches and flushing dns through ipconfig and all that. I even found the way to sneak in by going directly to a page that's not part of lite and logging in there, but there's no way to reset my preference in the regular version.

I suppose it makes sense, since the lite version isn't really released yet, it's a beta - but an open beta - and that means things may well go wrong.
However, since they're trying to make money off the ads being served up to me when I log in, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that they'd have a way for me to get back to seeing all those ads? Heck, I'd be happy to actually click on something just for the chance to get back in and see what's going on with all my friends.

I just realised that all my friends will probably see this on facebook, as my blog is linked to my page there. Enjoy the ads while you can, folks. You could be like me: on the outside not looking in.

grr.