Gadgetory

Facebook you love it you hate it it's complicated but in spite of the wild popularity of Facebook I kind of feel bad for them aside from their disastrous IPO this company has released more dud products over the past few years than anyone I can think of I'm Donald Bell and today's show I'm here to refresh your memory with my list of the top 5 Facebook product flops features that set out to change the world but didn't at all starting things off at number 5 Facebook Lite now this was a stripped down version of Facebook that was engineered to load more quickly for users on slow connections or slow Hardware they tossed out the apps it toss out the games they decluttered the whole interface oh and they also tossed out a bunch of those annoying flash based ads on the sidebar but those are the crazy pre-ipo days of 2009 turns out that catering to poor people and serving less ads wasn't a project worth keeping around after less than a year Facebook light got switched off at number 4 Facebook questions with 1 billion users at your disposal why not put them to work solving life's great questions launched in 2010 and killed off in 2012 Facebook questions gave users a way to pull their friends for questions like where it's the best pizza in Portland or which plan of the 8 sequel is the best or where the hell did Facebook questions go it was supposed to be a fatal blow to Yahoo Answers but instead it just kind of withered away at number 3 the ticker in 2011 Facebook did a major overhaul their news feed and gave us a terrifying and very annoying little window onto all of our friends likes and shares and comments it was like peering into the naked soul of Facebook and seeing its neuroses for what it really was and people hated that thing so Facebook quickly saw the error of their ways and gave us a way to hide it please hide it do yourself a favor awful coming in at number two face book deals oh this is a time when Mark Zuckerberg had the huevos to take on Groupon and LivingSocial I have to admit it kind of seemed like a good idea who better than Facebook to know where you live what you like and where you like to travel but maybe it was a little too perfect a little too perfect not to be creepy after four months Google deals got slashed now before we get to number one let's stop picking on Facebook for a minute you know another internet giant it makes a ton of mistakes Google you're my favorite five Google flops all of which are really just as embarrassing as anything Facebook has done that said at least Google has that whole don't be evil mission statement thing Facebook could have used that to help prevent them from thinking up number one beacon hey here's an idea let's make it so that Facebook can keep track of all the sites you browse outside of Facebook so that I can share that information with all of your friends what could go wrong not creepy at all the idea was such an affront to privacy that it resulted in the class-action lawsuit and even Mark Zuckerberg later admitted it was a mistake which is not to say that he won't try it again so there you have it five ideas launched by the king of social networks that wound up right in the gutter for more top fives like this head over to top-5 cnet.com Donald Bell thanks for watching you