7 Reasons Facebook’s Timeline Still Sucks

You've read the posts: "Help! Timeline is coming for me!" "Me no likey timeline!" "Agh! Timeline! I'll see you in hell, Mark Zuckerberg!" We didn't ask for it, and if we had known in advance what it was, we would have begged to be spared. Since late January of 2012, like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Facebook's Timeline has replaced the Wall and Profile of each one of your friends, one hapless soul at a time. On Facebook, no one can hear you scream. As a last stand, we offer to you seven reasons why Timeline sucks, even though we'll continue to post, share, and "like" photos of cats and what we ate for lunch.

1. It's non-optional: Facebook is free. Therefore, Facebook can and will do whatever it wants to with its users. Privacy? Choice? The customer is always right? Get over it. That's the Facebook business model in a nutshell. Like his hero Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg has never wasted time asking the consumers what it is they actually want. Why should he? He's made millions convincing people to accept a social networking site that is invasive, confusing, and maybe even doesn't do all that good a job of helping you keep in touch with your friends.
2. Even Mark Zuckerberg can't explain what it is: You know public speakers who really aren't all that good at public speaking, but everyone just tries to be supportive, not fall asleep, and applaud at the right moments? Well, that's Mark Zuckerberg. At the official roll-out of Timeline, Zuckerberg offered one of the most unexciting and unhelpful speeches ever delivered by a billionaire CEO, returning again and again to the mantra, "Timeline is the story of your life." Watching Zuckerberg speak, you almost feel sorry for the guy — that is, until you realize Timeline is not the story of your life. It's an ugly, visually confusing collage of photos, useless apps, and personal information that shouldn't be shared with every single person on the planet.
3. Timeline will suck up even more of our time: Timeline is insanely complicated. Sorting out what it does and how you can make it look a little more pleasing takes time that most people, who jump on and off Facebook a few minutes a day to blow off steam, just don't have. For all of Zuckerberg's insisting that Timeline is streamlined and visually more appealing, there are more links, more stats, more apps, and more useless information than anyone who wants to entertain some semblance of an existence beyond their computer can ever hope to "control" and process.
4. Nobody wants to spend seven days "teasing" their Timeline into shape: The assumption of the part of Zuckerberg and blogging enablers happy to suck on the Facebook teat is that you have nothing better to do over the course of seven days than "tease" your Timeline into shape. By "tease" we mean sitting in front of a computer and methodically updating privacy settings, checking to see who can and who can't see photos of you getting wasted after work, and deciding if something you posted more than five years ago is really appropriate for the current chapter in the story of your life. Zuckerberg and bloggers love spending hours, even days on computers, and don't understand that there are people who don't. Timeline reflects this disconnect.

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