Anyone noticed how Facebook is so deadly slow nowadays? I’m not just talking about when you try to view the profile of someone who’s decided to add every single useless application under the sun. That was an inevitable consequence of the powers that be opening up the API for people to develop applications. The problems with giving the users too much control and too many options was made clear by Myspace, with very few exceptions, it would be complimentary to use words like monstrosity or abhorrence to describe the asthetics of most peoples Myspace profile page.

Anyway back to the point. It’s not the profiles pages over burdened with Facebook apps of which I speak. No. Even just waiting for the apparently simple login page to load can be measured on a geologic timescale. One of the reasons for this surely lies in the way that the site is coded. Just look at the status bar on your browser whenever you load ANY facebook page. Look at the number of separate files that are loading. CSS files, javascipt files etc etc. It’s a fairly large number, even for that previously mentioned log in page. Another reason for the slowness must surely be attributed to the runaway success that facebook has become in the past few years. It’s use amongst my friends is almost universal, and many of them have promoted it to be their primary online means of communication between them, above email. I myself check ‘my facebook’ before I check my email accounts in the morning. So with such widespread adoption of the site, has it been that they have not upgraded their server capacity to cope with the demand?

Either way, I think they should sort it out and anyone watching this should join this group: Is it just me or is face book getting a bit slow.

Facebook is a great, great application and I hope that they fix this issue so that it goes back to being what it was.