Your Digital Companion

Sunday, July 17

Facebook’s new ‘Happening Now’ feature is a fail

It was just few days back that we informed you about Facebook’s new ‘Happening Now’ feature that Facebook team planned to roll out (as a testing feature) for limited amount of users. Guess what? The idea of Facebook for testing and launching this ‘Happening Now’ feature is extremely opposed by the large number of people using Facebook.

In previous post of ‘Happening Now’ mentioned Facebook’s statement about its new feature, which says:

“We are currently testing a feature within the news feed that gives people the ability to see what their friends are commenting on and liking, as these actions are being taken on Facebook.

This test includes a small percentage of Facebook users, just a fraction of a percent. In the coming weeks, as we learn more from this test, we’ll keep making improvements and may expand it to more people.”

It seems Facebook has begun testing its new feature by updating the profiles of the users selected for the ‘Happening Now’. Although, some of those chosen Facebook users contacted us and told us, that they are absolutely hating this ‘twitter-like’ feature and earnestly want Facebook to re-instate their profiles back to the old form.

The Facebook users who have been picked up for the testing of this new feature are extremely angry with the Facebook administration, and they have even created a Facebook group “Facebooks “Happening Now” Haters” for protesting against this un-informed Facebook feature updated on their profiles.

Many people using Facebook (who have not yet received the update of this new feature) must be thinking that how does this new feature look like? So for showing them, we have attached an image of the ‘Happening Now’ feature below, which we recently received from a Facebook user named Suzann Welker.

Facebook Happening Now Feature
Click to enlarge

By looking at the above image one can clearly see that Facebook has now placed this new feature by removing the pokes, upcoming events and birthday updates from the right hand side of the user’s home page.

Another Facebook user named Vickie Escalante, who is also a testing victim of this new Facebook feature, explained us the details of the ‘Happening Now’ via email:

The Happening Now “twitter-like” feed on the right is distracting, first of all.  One lady mentioned that she has seizures and the constant movement really could affect that.

The Happening Now scroll includes things such as my friend likes her friend photo and then I can look at that photo/post/whatever.  No. 1, I don’t care if that person isn’t my friend.  No. 2, wouldn’t that be a privacy issue?

I absolutely hate that they have removed the top news/recent news feature.  I must scroll more than half way down my page to find (in small, light letters) my recent news.  Before I get to the recent news, I am forced to look at news as old as a day ago and as recent as 4 minutes ago.  So, by the time I get to the recent, I’ve read some of the recent news and again, read the old news!!!  I personally never cared for the top news feature before, but would die for it now!

Notifications, birthdays, pokes, etc., are difficult to find or virtually non-existent.  It took me almost a week to find the “pokes” and still don’t know where the birthdays are.

We don’t like Twitter, thus the reason for using FB.  We don’t want our sight to be comparable.

Lastly, we hate that we were “chosen” and not asked to take part in this.  For me personally, last Friday my FB couldn’t be accessed for at least 4 hours as it said my site was being serviced and then this showed up.  More like my sight was being hacked by FB itself!

One thing which is very important in the above points is the ‘privacy issue’. Facebook by rolling out this feature has also gave birth to the privacy issues of the users, as the new feature is now showing photos, comments and other updates of the Facebook users (strangers) who are not even in the friend’s list. One more big thing to notice, is the removal of the top/current news from the top of home page, which means users now won’t able to see ‘all’ most recent updates from their friends and fan pages under the News Feed on Facebook home page.

Considering all the negative points this new feature has brought, we would like to inform Facebook developers that they should look into this matter and fix the problems faced by a normal user due to this implementation of new ‘Happening Now’ feature.

You can jump to the comment’s section of our previous post for viewing the negative feedback user’s have given on this new ‘Happening Now’ feature of Facebook.

Please let us know if you are also facing same problems like the other Facebook users, by commenting in the box below.