Jamison "JAK" Kissh

I’ve been on Facebook since it was first opened to high school students, when it was still very basic. It was great, it was fast and much easier on the eyes than it’s dreaded counterpart Myspace. Then it became insanely popular and started to slow down, I understand that happening but it’s been in the news and publicized insane amounts over the past couple of years and it’s number of users has jumped through the roof. Granted I do not fully understand backend development on a site the size of Facebook but regardless, I find it a little pathetic that after all this publicity, money, and users that they still can’t manage to have uptime more than 1/4 (if even) of the time that I try to log on. For any other company on the net this would be inexcusable (look at Gmail’s recent outage and the ensuing outrage) but for Facebook it’s ok? Why?

Facebook’s development is great but to me it seems as though they’re moving too fast for their servers (or even users sometimes) to handle. They open the site to developers, great, but now it’s even slower and more annoying with all these applications. They open up their login to developers, great, but now if you try to use it you just have to pray that at that particular moment the site is responding and you don’t get stuck half logged in with a fancy little lightbox that you can’t get out of stuck over the site.

Today I pose one question and a possibly simpler answer. Why is Facebook able to get away with their terrible uptime/availability? My solution: Slow down. Stop trying to do everything at once, make sure the backend can support these ridiculous things.

I keep thinking that they might get on top of things and every time I do they swamp themselves with another release of the news feed or something of the like. I feel as though this is just irresponsible development and quite frankly, pathetic. I’m just waiting to pounce on the next big social network to get away from this horrid thing.

A few weeks ago when I went to Paris and London for the week I made a bet with my friends that they couldn’t get 10,000 notifications to be waiting for me when I returned home. Well I got home and my friend’s account was disabled and my wall was erased. This sort of threw me into a ranting post about how hard it is to contact Facebook. Well alas my ranting and attempts at contact prevailed, tonight I learned that my friends old account has been enabled and my wall posts (all of them) are back.

I’ve yet to get an email back from Facebook nor am I sure that I will however someone within the company is listening even though it took them forever to get to taking any action.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love(d) Facebook just as much as every other 18 year-old does until I went on vacation and made a bet with some friends.

I was going to be in Europe for a week without my computer or text messaging, so I would have no clue what was going on with my Facebook account. One of my friends jokingly said that he’d leave me at least 1,000 wall posts to get a ton of notifications for me when I get back. I later bet him and another friend that they couldn’t get me 10,000 notifications. Little did I know they enlisted a little help. While I was gone a team of people set to work to write as many wall posts as humanly possible on my wall however mid-week I get a phone call from my friend Spencer telling me that his co-conspiritor, JD’s Facebook account has been banned and my wall posts have all been removed.

Now I returned to the states with full intentions of contacting Facebook and seeing if there was anything I could do to rectify the situation. Now I understand that with as many active users that Facebook has they need to have a certain amount of self help procedures in place but even places with extensive self help techniques, such as PayPal at least have a number or email to use for help. Facebook does not have such a feature and I’m finding it nearly impossible to find a general contact point to use in order to try and rectify the situation. If anyone has some contact information for Facebook I ask that you please share it.

All I’ve got to say is British Airways and Verizon Wireless customer support for the win!

Update: Today I finally found an email (info@facebook.com) that was more neutral than the previous email addresses I’d found to contact them at and sent off an email which I’ll include below. I’m hoping to hear back from them soon.

Hello,
My name is Jamison Kissh and recently (on or around April 14th) my wall may or may not have been flagged for have been coming under attack of spammers or something similar. This is not the case, in fact it’s far from the truth. Before I left for a tour of Europe two friends of mine (XXXX XXXXX and XXXXX XXXXXX) bet me that they couldn’t have 10,000 notifications waiting for me, a sill bet admittedly. However I received a phone call on the 14th telling me that my wall had been deleted.

When I returned to the United States I tried to find an email address at which I could contact the department that is in charge of spam or in charge of walls directly however this was to no avail. Just today I was able to find an email that wasn’t quite for having my account disabled.

I ask for two things if they’re at all possible. The first being that after being a member of Facebook for several years, since the footers used to say “I’ll find something to put here” quite a while ago I had accumulated a very large wall of warm wishes and what not. I ask that if it is possible that my wall be reinstated, even if it’s form a backup and I per-say lose my more recent posts.

The second is that you re-examine my friend XXXX XXXXX’s account that was banned as a result of this bet and has in fact caused numerous problems for him such as nearly being banned again for friend requesting too many people as he re-friended his many lost connections.

I thank you for your time and I look forward to talking with you. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me using any of the means listed in my signature or via the Facebook platform it’s self.

Hopefully that’ll do the trick

Alright well our school uses an active filter which blocks very poorly and randomly blocks sites. An example of this is below:

As you can see they block http://apple.com for pornograpy? Also they do not block http://www.apple.com which doesn’t quite make sense to me. The filter also sporatically filters Youtube, Digg, and Flickr.

Well I’m sure everyone that uses Facebook knows what I’m talking about when I yell about the status updates, in case you don’t it’s a short little blurb to let people know what you’re doing or what’s on your mind. Example below:

Now for a few examples of terrible updates:

As you can probably tell I blurred out the names to protect the “innocent.” Now the first one I don’t quite even get to tell you tell you the truth but it could have been preceded with “[name] is thinking…”. The second is nicely put and props to her. The third could have been phrases something like “[name] is wondering…”

As you can see it doesn’t take a whole lot of thought, either people are just flat out lazy or just flat out stupid. Here’s a quick snapshot of my status updates page. Some people were smart enough to figure out how to write in third person. The others… well use your imagination as to what I’d say.