Nearly most recent

I know - I haven't had a Facebook rant for, well, almost a year and even then it wasn't a proper 'rant'.

But Facebook have recently released a new update to their Android app.

Fortunately this solves for me one of my main bug-bears - the widget refresh rate. Previously the widget would be telling me things that happened hours ago... at best. Usually it was "Yesterday a 9:00am" or something daft. This made the widget realistically useless. Now it isn't - now it updates with your most recent.

Which brings me to the question:

When is your most recent not your Most Recent?

When it's Facebook's Most Recent.

Confused? I'm not surprised.

Back in September 2011 Facebook unleashed Top Stories upon us.

No-one really knew what a Top Story was.

You could tell Facebook who or what was likely to be a Top Story, but it took an absolute arse-load of effort at that stage to go through your hundreds of friends and select which of them were top friends. And if - like me - you check your Facebook every few hours anyway, this was the most unhelpful of features in a long while.

Annoyingly, all searches and your newsfeed defaulted to Top Stories, and each time you had to manually select Most Recent. That eventually changed on the website and your own choice became 'reasonably sticky' - that being that Facebook would forget your choice as and when it felt like it so you still had to check the tiny little writing at the top.

But with its app, you had no way of knowing whether you were viewing Most Recent or Top Stories. With the updated release there is a tick indicator. And again, it has - thankfully - become reasonably sticky. You do have to check it every time as it does occasionally forget your preference, which defeats the object of it being sticky in the first place, but at least it half-makes-the-effort.

The only problem is the different meanings of Most Recent.

You see, if you log in via the web platform, Most Recent means the most recently posted status.

On the app that isn't the case. Most Recent is the most recently posted, liked or commented upon status. So, if your friend posted his status (or photo or whatever) four months ago, but someone liked it two minutes ago; on the web it would be nicely buried into their Timeline, but on the app it shows up as more recent than your friend's much more recent status update from just three minutes ago.

Irritating?

Don't even start!

It almost seems to be part of Facebook's policy to disenfranchise its established users. Facebook is starting to become a perfect example of a "Bad Corporation" that establishes a client-base, and then simply exhausts that client-base, milking it for all it is worth until - eventually - they realise better and move on.

It did it with Top Stories - foisting it upon us without actually asking whether or not we wanted it, whether it was actually a benefit to anyone.

They did it with the Facebook.com email addresses - your visible email address on there automatically defaulted away from whatever you had registered and wanted people to see in case they needed to contact you urgently, to a Facebook email address. If you didn't know, you wouldn't know: they didn't email you to tell you, or highlight the change the next time you logged in. It was silent.

I'm not sure I have convinced myself by my own argument that they are doing this to actively exploit the client-base for a number of reasons.

Firstly, we are not the client-base. We are free users. We are the resource. We are the data, we are the audience, it is the advertisers who are the clients. If they institute policies which actually make people less likely to use Facebook, then it affects their ability to sell adverting and therefore their revenue stream.

Secondly, if they are actively going out there to exploit on the basis that their users are too 'stuck' to Facebook to move, don't count on it. Just ask Myspace or Digg what ignoring your users when undertaking fundamental redesigns or functional adjustments can do to your 'sitting' userbase.

Now, I am fully aware that there does need to be forced migration in some circumstances. People don't like change, and often cannot see the benefit of change. I discussed it in the previous post about Timelines. But does anyone see a benefit from these changes?

Let's face it, this is a massive, multi-national company. Decisions as fundamental as these can't be imposed without substantial focus group analysis and testing to see whether it would harm the business. They can't be imposed without there being a proper cost-risk analysis and a business case proposal.

Surely?