As an Indie Author I have found Facebook invaluable for finding book reviewers and bloggers.  As any indie can tell you, reviews from bloggers and book reviewers are imperative to being taken seriously as an author.  Friends can, and do, write reviews for authors.  However, strangers can always tell when a review is biased.  Therefore, we authors spend many hours searching for reviewers and inquiring if our book can please be reviewed.  Facebook has helped a lot in that respect.

However, a few months back Facebook changed the look of the newsfeed.  Now so much information comes across that any personal friend's message is likely to get lost.  I thought I had solved it by making each of my contacts a "close friend".  Ha! I thought smugly, I will just click on close friends and lose a lot of the other stuff. 

Unfortunately, Facebook decided that I want to know every move each "close friend" makes.  I now have to see each comment they make on any of their other friends posts, even though I don't know those people.  I have to see every picture strangers post because a "friend" of mine commented on it. 
This makes it impossible to catch everything someone says that I actually would like to comment on, unless I quit writing and painting so that can Facebook full time.  Therefore, I might as well not be on Facebook at all.

Plus it really feels like an invasion of privacy.  I don't think it is every friend of a friend's business what I say on Facebook, nor do they need to see everything I post.  Evidently others feel this way, too, because I am seeing a whole lot more of just generic sayings and photos being posted than I am original thoughts.  Why take the time to share your thoughts if they just get lost in all of the yada yada with strangers that Facebook decided we should care about?

Yeah, I know some people have said you "just hover over a persons name and click on something or another" and you won't see all of those extra posts.  Not only am I not sure if that will then also eliminate the comments I SHOULD see, but I simply don't have the time to do that to every contact I have on Facebook.  Unless you have about 10 friends on there it would take hours or days. 

I used to really love going on there.  Now it gets me tense.  Too much information by too many people I don't know and the fear that I am missing posts from people I do care about.  I post a lot of things about my writing.  I don't want my friends to think I am only interested in sharing MY stuff...but I am afraid it may look that way.  Of course, they may not see my stuff either.  I have noticed a drop off in commenta about anything I post, both professional and personal.  Unless you hang on facebook all day and make it your social center I think it is just too hard to look through the mess and find the posts to comment on.

I hear more changes are in the works.  So far, the changes have not been for the good.  I would like things back to clean and simple.  That way I could actually see what my contacts are saying and show them I give a damn by commenting more often.  So much for "social" networking.  This is just a bunch of information jammed down our throats and it is no longer effective or fun.