Any screenshots and details of functionality may no longer be relevant.
I know I can come off as a Facebook fanboy at times. Facebook Timeline for Pages was launched only five days ago, and I’ve already written 10 tutorials about it.
Sure, I dig it. But there are certain things that I hate. And I hope Facebook does something about them before Timeline officially goes live at the end of March.
1. Notifications
I have yet to officially switch over to Timeline yet for my page, and I occasionally go back to the old version. The main reason is in regards to notifications.
With the old design, notifications were simple. It went like this:
- I’d get a little alert on the right hand side
- I’d click on the arrow to bring up a list of recent notifications
- As soon as I hid the list, the notification icon disappeared.
Throughout this process, I never left my main page view. It was quick and simple.
Now, this is what happens:
- I get an alert on top of the Admin Panel button at the top
- I click on that to go to the Admin Panel, which takes a while to load
- I can view the new notification, but have to click on it to make the icon go away.
- When I click on the notification, I’m taken out of the Timeline and Admin Panel view.
- To go back to my Timeline, I then have to click on a link for my page.
- Finally, I need to click the button to hide the Admin Panel.
It’s a major pain. That notification doesn’t disappear unless I go through all of these steps. Facebook, can you please bring back the one click view without leaving my current page? It was very convenient to both see what that update was while removing the notification without having to go anywhere.
2. Slow Load Time
Another reason I’ll occasionally find myself back on the old design of my Facebook page is because of the slow load time of Timeline.
Whether it’s Timeline itself or the admin panel, navigation is much slower than on the old version. Sometimes, fast and simple is better.
3. Empty Spaces
Sometimes this happens after I hide an item from my Timeline.
Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to why it happens. But for whatever reason, there will be completely empty spots in my recent Timeline that could be better served by holding content. It looks buggy, and I hope it’s actually a bug and not by design.
4. Missing Posts
I didn’t even notice this until a user pointed it out today. She thought that her Timeline was only showing posts by the admin and nothing by fans. Then I looked at my Timeline, and I was seeing much of the same. At least until I scrolled down to a month ago.
The thing is, I’ve received several posts to my wall/Timeline in the meantime. I went into my Activity Log and confirmed that there were about a dozen that should have appeared. They even had the open circle icon next to them indicating that they should be shown and not hidden.
All of the following posts (and several others) should be on my Timeline.
So… where are they?
5. Admin Panel
I like the general idea of the Admin Panel. I like that it does a much better job than the old design of aggregating all of the relevant admin stuff in one place. But I hate how it opens a new invisible panel at the top of the page, pushing everything down that I was just doing. I hate how it takes forever to load. And I hate how I often click Help instead of Hide because the panel finally pops up while I was in the middle of clicking my mouse.
There’s gotta be a better way of doing this.
What about you? Are there things about Facebook Timeline for Pages that you hate? List them in the comments below!
