I’ve been playing around with Facebook a fair bit, and I have to admit that I actually do like it. One of the reasons is that it’s quite strict with what can and can’t be done, limiting features, and therefore focussing on the social networking side which is it’s main aim.
Other sites such as got distracted by allowing users to edit profiles their profiels with songs, videos, skins, etc which all adds up to a real mess when put in the hands of a novice who fills their pages up with rubbish, leading to an unnaceptable loading time. Couple this along with a really buggy script and you are on to a bad thing. It should always be ‘content over style’.
There is no real customisation in Facebook apart the details you enter and a few other configurable options, and everything you do adds to the content of the site. It is clean, which I something I like, and everything is at most only 2 clicks away. It is also a great way of avoiding any work!
In other news, Petit Tom came round on Wednesday night and brought his apparently broken laptop. He was going to eBay components of it but I suggested that I could take a look at it and see if there was anything I could do to mend it. What’s the worse I could do? Make it work even less?
Tom had tried to do a clean install, but this had crashed and now the PC wouldn’t even get past the first stage of boot-up. After much fiddling with the bios and the actual physical parts of the laptop (only taking things out and putting them in again) it was eventually was able to take a clean install of Windows XP and was working fine.
I had mentioned Ubuntu to Tom before and he was quite interested so when the new release, 7.04, came out of beta and was released yesterday I installed that on the laptop instead of XP and it worked perfect.
This was the first proper Ubuntu install I’d ever done and it was very simple and quick, giving me an OS that can easily rival Windows. Apart from being completely free, there is also a large amount of free software too which is easily installed. The only piece of software that I had to install externally was Skype, but even that was available for Linux users.
I handed the laptop over to Tom and he was really suprised with the ease of use for someone who has always used Windows. Many people expect to be greeted with something completely new and at first unusable, but in reality they don’t differ too much is their graphical interface and so it’s very easy to switch over, with only a few different features to get to grips with.
One more happy customer.
