C'mon Facebook! What are you thinking?

Are the latest FB updates a UX fail? Or is this just one brilliant ingredient to the new "secret sauce" of social due out today at f8?

Pulling my hair out. And not much to work with, Yet another seemingly useless Facebook update irritating my social fiber. Thanks. Seems like every time one turns around the coders at Facebook have come with some narrow, engineer driven, new, improved concept of how things should work, look, and feel. "Hey guys!" I just rewrote that algorithm and optimized the variable of quantifying the edge ranking based on the number of times a user clicks on a family member (first cousin or closer) more than twice a month on consecutive Tuesdays, as that's when our statistics show the highest weight of family-to-family member posts - including photos!" "Oh yeah... I changed the background colour for photos so you can't see the ad links behind them and have to scroll down the page to see the comments as well"

Here's a tip Facebook. What's fun for engineers is not always what's fun for the rest of the world. We want it simple. And simple means - something we can understand - not something you can understand. The news feed has come farther and farther away from anything relevant to me. People I have never posted to, commented on, or received anything from, constantly come into the top of my feed, I had given up on the feed and used "most recent" only. Simple enough to scroll down that list. Now you've complicated that and removed the easy drop down filter. Geez! And added a ticker/scroller in the sidebar - where I can Facebook while I'm Facebooking? At least have the courtesy to allow us to turn these on/off as modules, just like My Yahoo or Google. Or is that your plan?

Ahhhh.... the plot thickens. Later today the powers that be at FB are going to launch something BIG. A new game-changer for social as some report it.  I have no insight how it will be, but with some of the changes we're seeing I wonder if modularity will be the cornerstone of the new FB. The rumor mill abounds with music services, or music service plugins perhaps? Netflix, Hulu, or other video serivces integrated? Skype video? Already there. Yup! I think FB is going modular and the simple ticker/sidebar is why. Today that little feature seems quite redundant, but if the central area of screen real estate on FB is being filled up with music, video, or other services (video requiring large viewing real estate) then the social interactive features need to become modular and more of an IM oriented piece of the proposition. That's why they have been putting so much effort into the UX placement and capabilities of the messaging and the chat functions. Think about the usefullness of the ticker for listening or viewing parties powered by Spotify or Hulu. Now you're getting it.

Just my theory looking at the box from the outside but who knows? We'll find out shortly.