The Mockingjay Timeline Rant

I usually like when the internets are refreshed.  I like when the old is made new and shiny and less like 1998.  but the new timeline thing was a little ambitious even for you Mark.  FB, let me say it-you're a fancy blog, a list of writings on the internet.  the blog format has worked for some basic reasons.  you can scroll backwards and forwards through a history (like a timeline) of posts.  the posts are placed there by a person, and until that person or the google removes them, they are there for all to see.  they may even, gasp!, be somehow relevant to each other, or tell a running story.  they're not plucked out of the air because of their popularity.  or chosen according to a pre-decided relevance factor by some algorithm.  that's what makes it a viable two way conversation.  well, you know, not this blog of course.  no friend(s), this blog is more of a private journal.  but really, the new timeline setup is like if you were reading your magazine and it magically hid the articles that it didn't think you would want to see.  you'd never read anything new!  I'd be flipping through a Maxim and every story would be a shallow fluff piece about expensive cars, pretty girls and gadgets.  I can't even imagine it.

ease of use and fiducial issues aside, the dual sided timeline part makes me physically queasy.  you look left, right, left right going down the wall trying to figure out what you're looking at as you try to take in the content.  it's pretty jarring!  luckily, to make it easy for us there is a permanent info box mid-stream that displays "friends." even though there is another smaller but as permanent "friends"box not 30 pixels away, thanks for saving me the carpel tunnel of moving my wrist that extra inch.  phew now we can really FB our brains out.

I actually liked timeline at first.  you can enter in your own events, and make important things bigger.  it helped me get rid of anything embarrassing, which didn't leave very much.  but after a while it got slightly irritating, and it drove me to tell my tortured tale on this blog.  Now would be a good time to mention that I just read all of three of The Hunger Games books in one weekend and I can be irritated with pretty much anything right now, even puppies.  "oh I'm tragically torn between two men that fall all over me but I can't even decide because I'm so downtrodden and it's me against the world.  and everyone else is faulty but I'm the most important thing to mankind, boo hoo.  and all my friends are super powerful vampires..." oh wait, wrong book.  way to screw up cool sci fi with a gallon of HFCS.  needless to say, I was hooked at first but did not like where I ended up!  And that, my friends, is why I do not like the new facebook timeline.  sorry if you just read all of that.