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Comment by SandB0x | Hacker News Reader

I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes. It's got the the little messenger panel on the right. It's got the clunky mail client, it's got the calendar and you can invite people to a meeting/party. You have to use it because everyone else uses it and everyone else uses it because it's been around for years.

It's not fun or simple to use any more and you have to be on your guard about what you share and who might see it.

It's not really surprising that teenagers aren't into it.

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The transformation won't be complete until they make it so F5 clears your credentials and logs you out of Facebook.

That was always my favorite Lotus Notes feature. Nothing like trying to refresh your email in a hurry when someone has just sent you something and having to enter your stupid credentials again.

I used to find entering my password in the Notes client rather disturbing - see the bottom of this page:

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=or...

"Further, as groups of characters are typed, the images on the dialog change to distract the would-be onlooker from observing the number of (extraneous) characters typed. "

Actually, the hieroglyphics are just another dubious security feature. The theory is that you know what the hieroglyphics are for the correct password, and if they aren't shown, the login box is being spoofed. In reality, this is dumb, since any regular Notes user just tunes out that part of the login box.

If someone could memorize your hieroglyphics, does that mean they could perform an offline attack at guessing your password?

Hell, even if they only memorized the first few sequences, they would know how your password starts.

Presumably the hieroglyphics are generated based off a hash of what you're typing, so there will not be a one-to-one mapping of hieroglyphics back to data typed. Also, since the hieroglyphics are nonsensical and change quickly, you would probably find it easier to watch their physical keystrokes then trying to memorizing a stream of symbols.

That said, all logical bets are off when analyzing a hare-brained feature like this.

In the current implementation, it doesn't show them until after you type the fifth character, to prevent exactly this kind of attack.

They also replaced the hieroglyphics with a key chain, which implies that at some point someone actually redesigned this wacky features.

Wow this is great stuff.

I remember I had to use Lotusnotes with its main language set as Hebrew.

That meant everything on the screen was "flipped" and since I was not 100% up to speed on the language- for the first little while it was nearly incomprehensible. Even as I improved reading, the software still seemed clunky and it was a pain to perform basic tasks.

I always imagine that someone who can't read the language on the screen could muscle their way through and "figure it out" and become proficient on a product with a well designed ui/ux.

"I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes."

Ouch - that is a bit harsh.

Like SAP, Notes was created to allow Lucifer to interact with our world [1]

1 http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/allegedly-rig...

Edit: In fairness to SAP - other large scale ERP systems are probably how other eldritch abominations seek to gain control of us.

Could not disagree more. As someone who has been on facebook since 2005, I'm using it more every year than I've ever used before. I think the facebook product is extremely well thought out. For example, I make extensive use of the post-level privacy features which allows me to post items that I don't want certain people to see.

You alone, most likely. The majority of people don't care to dive that deep, and as such these useful features you use simply don't exist for the majority.

You don't have to dive deep at all. It's literally next to the post button. It cannot get more surface level.

I'm reminded of what JWZ said to someone working on groupware around the time that Facebook was started:

>So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

That's been fixed for a certain group of students. It's called youporn.com.

That's the anti-solution in this case: youporn makes it easier to not get laid.

I think, technically, it makes not getting laid easier.

On HN I believe that would technically be referred to as an anti-pattern.

Hence the rise of snapchat?

This. Got too many friends of my parents on Facebook and then one of them started talking about things I had shared (or friends had shared, I don't know) to my mother, which upset her. So rather than censor myself all the time, I took a good hard look at what value Facebook produced for me, realized it's just a waste of time, and deleted it. Don't miss it all.

It's not lotus notes until they seriously screw up the ui. It's actually almost inconceivable that facebook's ui could become that screwed up, regardless of how much you despise facebook.

It isn't like Facebook doesn't "revamp" the UI all the time and confuse everyone while making it a worse experience. I can see it getting there eventually. Facebook used to be rather simple, now it is a convoluted mess. Not only is it a convoluted mess, but ever different "version" of it is different. The mobile app is much different from m.facebook.com which is much different from facebook.com and the iOS app is probably different too. Remember lite.facebook.com? I MISS IT SO MUCH!! :( Oh yeah sometimes the picture viewing interface is different depending on what you clicked on. Ever try to find a video someone uploaded? Go ahead. It's under Photos > [Name's] Photo's > Videos. Yeah...

What's with all the needless JavaScript? And more importantly, all the JavaScript ERRORS?

It's not that inconceivable. What do people want out of Facebook? To communicate with people, the way they want to communicate with them. Facebook has made several changes over the past few years (Timeline, for example) that alter how users get information from FB - and the result has been bad. So, yes, if FB continues to make changes that alter how people interact with FB, then the UI has been screwed up.

I don't hate FB at all, but I rarely use it. I never really was a heavy user but over the past year or so it's gotten to the point where I log in and it seems like I can't really find anything, so I log out. I can only imagine that the experience is the same for others.

It ceases to be cool when your grandmother just liked your relationship status...

Or may be your relationship status ceased to be cool :)

causalities... :)

My company still uses Lotus Notes for email. Is this common? I've talked to an IBM employee who vehemently defended it as a great piece of enterprise software. As did the IT folks in my company. Conceivably folks trying to keep in touch with old friends and relatives will use Facebook no matter what. Just like companies using Lotus Notes because it's too expensive to change.

It does often require a lot less overhead to maintain for an enterprise. However, there are certain... synergies... that are attainable when deeply integrating your entire communication portfolio on Exchange / MS products that using the Redmond stack is hard to say no to.

I'm not a FB fan, nor have I developed Notes apps in a good 8+ years, but Facebook might be like notes in another way: Both seem to do what they do, in their time, better than anything else out there.

When I saw Notes being mentioned, flashbacks of LotusScript, NotesSQL and came, especially it's non-relational DB (nosql a decade earlier than the rage it became later).

Notes incredibly clunky mail and document system did a few things well before anything else -- great two way replication of data for online and offline work. Domino took Notes apps and rendered them for the web, allowing complex web apps to be built in a time where there was little like it.

I didn't hesitate to leave Notes, but it wasn't for lack of respect, it was just one of the half dozen or so stacks I worked in at the time. Every line of code we write will be crap in 5 years. Every stack we use will be crap in 5 years. Everything's new, but everything's the same too.

You can't be serious. Facebook is used daily by hundreds of millions of people. The interface is heavily data driven and widely understood.

What's clunky about the "mail client"? And compared to it's supposed competitor - Snapchat? Really? I doubt you've actually used Lotus Notes. And perhaps you have some suggestion on how they could improve the messaging interface, but I doubt you could point out anything terribly clunky.

98% of people I know use facebook and are not confused by the interface nor do they complain about the interface. Personally I find it very well designed. Almost everything I need to do is easy to find and features are discoverable. The only significant confusion I have sometimes is around user list management.

This false schadenfreude is really silly.

> I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Things like electrical power, indoor plumbing, etc., used to be viewed as very sexy new innovations and are now "boring", yet they have been massively successful.

I think FB is struggling to provide a platform for others to build on that doesn't turn into a spam inbox. "Lotus Notes" represents the pendulum swinging away from the 30 farmville viral invites per day that was the recent past.

Meanwhile, Twitter has just become faster and cleaner.

I've noticed the local news stations have all moved their anchor contact methods to Twitter. So it is not far behind.

A sure sign Twitter's death spiral has begun?

AOL springs to mind as well. Facebook Pages are very similar to AOL Forums, Keywords and all.

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