Facebook's new features, but borking up the site in the process

You know when it's going to be a rough week, is when Facebook throws a hissy-fit, and you have to resort to actually writing essays that are due in later next week.

Part of a series of updates, many users of the world's largest social network will have noticed brand new features across their profile page and news feed. Seemingly small updates, these are ultimately designed to save time and increase access to the end user.

But Facebook has not learned from past mistakes. Though a free service, the customers in this case, over 500 million of them, are not pleased, with a series of borks and screw-ups which is causing the site to become close to unusable.

So far today, I've personally struggled with:

• The notification counter displays zero and does not shift until you click on it.
• When you do, it displays the usual list of notifications temporarily before swifting you away to the full notification page.
• People updating posts half way through because they have yet to discover how to drop down to a new line with the Enter-to-post feature (it's Shift + Enter, by the way).
• Event pages and group pages are not displaying the wall, even though notifications are still flowing in.

And for those who have recently updated to the new messaging feature that Facebook is slowly rolling out, many users are struggling with a great deal of problems.

• Each time you click on a person to chat to in your online contacts, it creates a new chatting tab at the bottom of the page, without any capability to send messages.
• Or, if the user can do, users cannot close the window down.
• If you're lucky, your messages do go through but then your messages suddenly do not display. But, you are lucky to some extent in that all chat messages go through the Messages area, but you get a flash and a buzz from your mobile phone every time that happens.

A lesson from the younger generation to Facebook. People don't like change. Younger people as an innate feature of their personalities, on the most part, do not like change.

It's this sort of indiscriminate attitude towards your userbase demographics that will turn people off the site. It's already forced me to log out for the night and resort to the mobile interface on my phone.

Frankly, I think many would rather the entire site was down than struggling to cope with the frustrating string of failures and site screw-ups.