I like to think we’ve all been given something to unite behind in the past week. I speak not of Easter, nor the collective disappointment in the Commodores, but instead how utterly terrible CBS’s Facebook bracket system has been and continues to be.
Leaving aside that the load time for groups and brackets harkens back to an age when the AOL dial-up noise interlude in “Digital Get Down” actually made a little sense, the scoring system has been atrocious. On the first day, group scoring refused to load on my computer. This was a precursor for Saturday night when each time I refreshed my bracket a randomly generated score appeared: 49, 28, 62, 23, 45 and so on. The brackets themselves are not Facebook’s fault, but letting CBS control the brackets was their mistake — a mistake I can assume will become more common as Facebook becomes more and more a corporate enterprise.
To begin with, March Madness brackets on Facebook was one of those ideas that’s so simple and rational that it’s brilliant, and in the past, when the brackets were an in-house feature, they worked smoothly and without widespread issues. The same can be said for Facebook in general: An online social network for college students was hardly something out of Proust, yet Mark Zuckerberg still has $1.7 billion at age 23 for stumbling across it.
Obviously, Facebook isn’t what it used to be. CBS’s ownership of the brackets is as clear a sign as you could find, though a close runner up would be the quietly absent “Too close for missiles, I’m switching to guns.” The advent of Facebook applications certainly signified a major change in the corporate approach. Not to get nostalgic for something so inconsequential as Facebook, but I much preferred the college-only informality of even two years ago to the combination of garish, MySpace-like applications and the too-serious “social networking” of today’s Facebook. I don’t really want CBS running my brackets, and I don’t like the pressure of a potential employer looking at my Facebook profile.
Of course, someone else has become a tad disgruntled with Facebook, as well: the Feds. Between the simultaneous explosion of Facebook across non-college demographics and the infusion of corporately owned applications, made for advertising and therefore profitable purposes, Facebook now has some considerable legal issues. Due to copyright issues, Scrabulous will soon be shut down. Meanwhile, these maligned March Madness brackets have fallen under federal scrutiny because of potential online or interstate gambling, both of which are illegal.
Despite the increasingly common experience of poor-performing applications and the bizarre trend of parents joining, Facebook seems to be a lasting presence. By virtue of its success and its control of the minimal competition, Facebook gets to become the information age’s glorified, personalized phonebook — a way for each person to catalog themselves in a way that transcends the borders of just one community, state or country. It should come as something of a comfort that in five years, we will be able to keep in touch with ease, or at the very least know what’s going on with the people we’ve lost touch with, even if that communication develops out of an infrastructure as superficial as Facebook.
Nevertheless, I’d prefer my Facebook old school. All I ask for is brackets that work, photos from spring break and Top Gun quotes. I suppose the obvious answer to my dilemma is a refusal to participate, but that’s both pretentious and stupid. I’ll just curse at my brackets instead.
