Dear Facebook

For the longest time, you were being boring an unoriginal. First you tried to turn status updates into tweets and become twitter, though honestly the existence of twitter as a separate entity is stupid so you taking over it's roll was fine in theory, sadly many still use twitter though. Then Google+ came out, and you copied some ideas from them in an attempt to be better so you could remain on top. All you were doing was copying ideas from other sites, and not coming up with anything unique to make Facebook actually better than others, you were content with just being just as good as others.

But now that's changing. The timeline thing is nice, I think I like it. It's unique and new, and actually makes Facebook different. It's nice to see some actual innovation. And there are other improvements too, like your Android App. The old app was probably the worst made app I'd ever used (except Words with Friends), it barely worked, was slow, awkward to navigate, etc. It was so bad I actually uninstalled it and just used the mobile version of your website. Randomly decided to download it again the other day, and WOW what an improvement. The UI is completely redone, and is actually really great now (better than G+'s mobile app actually in this one aspect), it's actually quite usable.

So thank you Facebook, keep this up and I might actually want to use you more than G+.
-SF

Dear SOPA and Protect IP

There are so many things wrong with you. I understand that piracy is a problem, and I agree that stopping it would be good. But what you're trying to do will basically destroy the internet as we know it. That seems extreme, but it's not an exaggeration, that's actually what you could cause. Most of the biggest and most important websites, like Facebook and Youtube just to name a couple, could easily be designated as being potentially useful for pirates, and just flat out blocked entirely. The problem is I think most of the people voting on you don't really understand the ramifications this will have on the internet as a whole, and the everyday lives of everyone who uses it. It's simply too extreme, and many innocent websites will be blocked.

Personally, I'm a supporter of the Safe Harbor Act (pretty sure that's what it's called), something that was passed a long time ago, which basically says a website cannot be held responsible for the actions of it's users. So when someone uploads copyrighted stuff to Youtube, the owner can complain, and Youtube usually cooperates (often too well), but Youtube cannot actually get in trouble since they simply provide a video hosting service and did not condone using it for illegal purposes. This approach is the only thing that will allow the internet to operate at it's full potential, since no website can actually control it's users, so if the website could get in trouble websites would have to be much more careful and strict and there'd be plenty of services that simply wouldn't be offered at all because of the risk they'd pose to the owning company.

The rules you're trying to create would not only destroy tons of already established things, but make creating new things on the internet have an inherent risk they don't currently have, so less stuff will be created, and the growth and innovation of everything on the internet would be greatly slowed. And on top of all of these negative effects, you also just plain won't work. Pirates will quickly find ways around the blocks, and continue pirating stuff all the time anyways, leaving you having no real effect on the piracy issue.

So please, for all our sakes, don't pass.
-SF

Dear Large Websites

When you make improvements and updates, why don't you just... update the whole site. What's the point of slowly rolling out updates to different people at different times? It doesn't make any sense. I understand testing things with small groups, but this isn't just a "testing phase" on a small group, and then update everyone. This is just randomly giving it out to a few new people everyday. It's INCREDIBLY frustrating.

Doesn't this create problems for you? Having multiple versions of your site must create issues sometimes when people on different version attempt to interact with one another. What's the benefit here? How is this a good idea in any way? Isn't it a lot more work to do the crazy, complicated process of slowly updating people?

Usually it'll be over the course of a few days, and that's a mild annoyance but whatever. Well sometimes it takes longer than that. I actually am currently worried that due to some strange glitch, I might be stuck never getting some updates. The layout of Google as a whole (the area at the top that is pretty much the same across all of their products) changed, and it has now been at LEAST like two or three weeks since people started getting the new layout, and it still hasn't changed for me. At the same time, youtube has gotten a whole redesign, and I don't have that one either. However, if I log in via a different browser (or in incognito mode, I use Chrome by the way), I get youtube's new layout. I logged in, played with some stuff, not sure how I feel about the changes but I could see it. Back in my normal browser though, it kicked me back to the old layout! Facebook ALSO is getting a re-design, which I of course can't see. Their adding the timeline thing, and this has some privacy implications. I was reading an article on Lifehacker about how this makes it much easier for people to see old posts, so you should consider making sure you don't have any old posts you don't want people to be able to find. Luckily, you can see your timeline now but they won't be publicly viewable for about a week. Well it's been about a week and I still can't see my own timeline. Can other people see mine? Can others see stuff of mine that I can't yet get to so I can't control?

Plus, on top of all that, I just like new things. I'm sure plenty of other people like new things too. Some of us want to be able to see and play around with new updates as soon as possible, and hanging them over our heads for WEEKS is just not cool.

So please, update everyone at once, or at least within a day.
-SF

Dear Internet

If you change your RSS feed for some reason, make sure the last update to the old one says something along the lines of "RSS feed is changing, click here for the new one."

I'm tired of occasionally losing updates from things without noticing.
-SF