Is it a bug if it's deliberate?

There's something really exasperating about repeatedly watching things one once enjoyed or found useful being turned into sterile profit-extraction machines by minions whose overarching goal is to maximize near-term profit. Facebook could be accused of this since it's earliest public recognition, and has therefore become a darling of investors over the last few years. They did everything right, if you follow the money. The only thing lacking might be some functional compass that would say: Wait a minute - Our fundamental value-proposition was "I want to share stories with my friends", not "Let's just shop and decree consensus opinion!"

Many ruffled feathers have flown in the wake of sketchy privacy ethics, ubiquitous salesmanship, and not surprisingly, disappointing IPOs, but it does not matter too much. The public is forgiving in that it has a stunningly short memory. Oracle is a trusted guardian of your data despite having been caught red-handed falsifying bench-marks and committing various other venial sins in the capitalist bible over the years. Microsoft is a respected entity despite highly impeachable business and engineering practices and repeated convictions for antitrust and predatory marketing violations all over the world. I think there's a seemingly close correlation between the developmental psychopathology of a Facebook selling a hockey-stick reality to investors and serious gaffes in user interface design.

Over the past years, Facebook has refined and tweaked a UI experience that is very attractive to many. It renders a social stream of gargantuan proportions in a way that makes some very computationally intensive work look smooth and simple to a user. You mostly just see a stream & don't worry about it. While you do, database servers are calculating Erdos neighborhoods, Nosql datastores are rendering streams ordered on keys generated from these calculations, bright and unassuming machines are figuring out where to shuttle content so you can get it faster, and how to redirect your browser's requests, and servers are feeding you a list of stuff that seems relevant to you. In the end, it looks simple, but getting there requires a lot of horsepower, finesse, dollars, and CO2

What has gone slightly askew is that as the rumor-mill decided that Facebook would possibly replace Google as the 'search engine' of the future (*this has nothing to do with search and everything to do with recommendation - but accurate language is not the strength of the tech-mob) and Facebook's valuation, expectations, and implicit promises shot through the roof, something started going wrong, in a Film Noir sort of way - the interface became obtuse and seemingly flawed. Non-modal dialogs so often treed the user into decisions that were not necessarily her decision. Clicking in one check-box changed the state of others outside the user's field of view. In short, it started acting like Windows - like an interface that did not follow established or intuitive interface rules, and that therefore defined the result of an interaction without requiring the consent of the actor.

In a more erudite world, this might seem like coercive visual language. Many of the early examples, where brilliant young Facebook UI engineers erred in some glaring way in a given release of a small feature for a few hours, amounted to botched editing abilities. But the short training video I saw tonight for assigning a username to a Facebook profile was a bit frightening. It might not seem like much - just like it might not seem like much to give your social security number to the checker at a supermarket (seriously - people do this unquestioningly in more repressive regimes, and you do it implicitly each time you use your ATM or "frequent shopper discount" ID tags), but it surely is not safeguarding anyone's privacy or freedom.

So what jumped out at me tonight is that I got an email for Poverty Sucks, a Facebook page I made some time back that I have really not attended to as I should. It was an announcement from Facebook that I could now assign a username to the Poverty Sucks account to 'improve my numbers' (you can see I'm seduced already!).

The weird thing is that at this particular moment in the training video and likewise in the applied scenario managing the page on Facebook, I can check on the 'availability' of a name, but' without warning, if a name I check on is available when I'm checking on it, it becomes mine.

 Visions of Mongol hordes raping an pillaging across the Caucasian planes notwithstanding, I find it a little forward to simply stick me with the first name I check on which is actually available, without telling me that 'checking' and 'buying' are now equal.

A sign of despair?