I attended what I now see was a rather progressive high school for the middle of rural Pennsylvania. I say this because when I was 17 I took computer classes--back when computers took up an entire room. You actually had to tell it what to do, so I had an introduction to programming way back in the '70's. I actually won a first-place award for keypunching--typing data lines that got punched into cards, which in turn got fed into that room-sized computer and with any luck made it do something amazing, like add 2 + 2.


I also owned one of the first Apple computers. It was actually purchased for my father to keep his farm records on, but he never got the hang of it, so I used it for word processing, and there was some clunky little game on it, too.

We were early subscribers to AOL, as well, back in the day of dial-up connections, which kept phone lines busy for hours.

So I am not your average bumbling baby-boomer when it comes to technology.

But Facebook makes me crazy.

I joined a few years ago to keep up with my kids in college. Nice--I always seemed to catch my son on Sunday nights, just before he went to bed. It was our special moment (yes, he is a mama's boy). But a lot has changed since those days of innocence, and I don't just mean my son graduated from college, got a job, got his own apartment, and got married. I mean that the face of Facebook has changed. And I don't like it.

Facebook has been a wonderful way for me to keep in touch with the friends I left behind in New England. I've found classmates I'd lost track of, far-flung family members, and former neighbors. It's the lazy man's socializing--I don't have to get dressed, or pick up a phone, or write anything on my calendar. I can just post a note to a friend's wall and wait for an answer. Sometimes someone's signed in at the same time I am, and we have a little IM chat. I'm really not interested in "liking" a myriad of causes, businesses, and the like, just so Mark Zuckerberg can try to match me up with other things his paying sponsors are offering. I don't want to link to applications that access my information. I just want to keep up with my friends.

Over the years that I've been a member, a lot of changes have been forced upon us. When this occurs, there's lots of grumbling, but most of us are too lazy to protest or leave to find a more user-friendly service (we'd have to acquire friends all over again), so we put up with the inconvenience of adapting to a new way of doing things, even though there was nothing wrong with the old way.

Now Facebook is forcing Timeline on us: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150408488962131  I can't just have a personal profile page that makes sense. No, I have to now make a page with blocks all over the place, with access to past posts (I've been on this thing for four or five years now--do I really want to slog through all that stuff to figure out who I want looking at it?). Distracting, hard to follow. I resent that I have to put more effort into ensuring my privacy by having to fiddle with another new feature. Why can't people leave well enough alone? Why does everything have to change?

I know, I'm sounding like an "old" person. But I'm not mourning the death of rotary phones and eight-tracks here. I'm talking about strangers who think they know what's best for me and everyone else, without even asking us what we'd like. People who are not technology-savvy are having a hard enough time negotiating Facebook as it is. Are they trying to lose followers??

If I'm so unhappy, why don't I just cancel my account? Because I've put a lot into Facebook, establishing a friend base, customizing everything to the way I like it. I might not like what they're doing to "my" stuff, but I'm not ready to end it all and find another social network that's more user-friendly. Yet. And I bet Facebook is banking on everyone feeling this way.