So you're annoyed that Facebook replaced the email address you listed on the social network with a @Facebook email you never use. Maybe you wish they'd let you edit your posts, rather than just the comments, and you're wondering why comment editing took so long anyway. Perhaps you still have issues with the Timeline profile that was foisted on you, or you're enormously irritated with Facebook's still-lousy mobile app.
And Facebook has one essential response to all of that. Like the honey badger, it just don't care.
Of course, the storied social network isn't saying that in so few words. But here's the response Facebook sent to Mashable regarding the email address update, currently being pilloried across the blogosphere: "As we announced back in April, we've been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site."
That announcement, which we covered in April, never said anything like "your prior contact info will be replaced," which is what users are understandably upset about. Still, Facebook shrugs and wonders why you weren't paying attention.
As for editing the content of your posts, which seems a natural and easy fix considering you can now edit the content of your comments (and which you've been able to do on rival Google+ since day one)? "It's something we might consider for the future," said a Facebook spokesperson, "but we don't have anything more to share right now."
We've seen this movie before. Many Facebook features are incomplete, highly complex or downright anti-productive. Witness the Other Messages feature, which takes its best guess at which emails you want to read, and stuffed the others in a separate folder most users have never seen. I know people who have missed out on job offers this way. Is it any wonder Facebook Mail hasn't taken off?
The Timeline update to profile pages was at least telegraphed fairly clearly — we knew about it months before it became available. But the switchover happened a lot more swiftly than many would have liked, and in any case Timeline solves problems few users ever had. (Who among us had a burning need to build a profile that could stretch back in time to the year 1000AD?)
Poll after poll shows that users hate Timeline, even months after its introduction. Other companies might consider walking the feature back, or at least allowing users the option of their regular profile page back. Suggest that to Facebook, however, and you'll get the PR equivalent of a blank stare and a shrug.
The message from Facebook these days is loud and clear (and there were echoes of it in the company's IPO roadshow). We'll work on what features we want, when we want. If it takes more than a year for us to bring out an iPad app, or if we're losing out on millions of dollars in monetization because we haven't figured out our mobile app yet, so what?
And hey, there's plenty of cause to think that way. When you have 901 million users, you can afford to lose a few. If you believe yourself to be on a wider social quest, you can't allow yourself get distracted by the petty day-to-day desires of the crowd. If you're the go-to network for everything, where else are they going to go?
Trouble is, Facebook is starting to look like the kind of large, stolid, unaccountable bureaucracy that — well, that protestors in Egypt used Facebook's services to help bring down. The kind that people may put up with for years, but that slowly brings them to a boiling point.
You may not leave Facebook per se. But you will probably spend less time on it (as the evidence suggests people are already doing, at least when it comes to Zynga games). You'll start to reduce your dependency on it as a communication tool, and make it more of a site you visit when you have the time.
Repeated on a wide enough scale, maybe that would be enough to rouse the honey badger into responsiveness. Or maybe, as with the snake's venom in the famous video, there isn't a controversy the social network can't sleep off.
Do you think Facebook cares enough about these kinds of concerns? Give us your take in the comments.
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