Facebook Rant

This is probably going to piss off a number of people, but somebody needs to say it: your Facebook profile picture should be a picture of YOU. Or at the very least, have you in it.

It's wonderful that you're proud of your son/daughter/pet. It's nice that you love this particular sports star/cartoon character/rock artist. Facebook offers other ways that you can share all of these loves and more. But when you make these things your profile picture, you are making Facebook harder for all the rest of us to use.

First, someone out there in the world might be looking for you. After receiving a recent friend request from a junior high friend I hadn't heard from in literally decades, I decided to try and look up one of my best elementary school buds. And even though his name wasn't quite as commonplace as, say "Bob Jones," my search still turned up dozens of possibilities. None of the people with actual photos were him. As for the baby, dog, football player, and snow-capped mountain? There's no way to know.

Of course, this will not be motivation for many of you. You may well not want to be found by some of the people who might be looking for you. And I can even respect that. But then let me hit you with problem #2.

When you log on to Facebook from a different computer for the first time, the site will ask you to verify your identity by going into your Friends list and pulling a few random photos. "Who is this?" it will ask you. And last time I had to do this, three of the four photos it presented me were not actually photos of the person in question! "Well, that is my friend. But that is some baby, that looks like something Bob Ross would paint, and that is a character from a comic strip." Even presented with multiple choice options for each photo, I was not able to successfully pass the "test" and log in on the first try.

So pretty please, let us see your smiling face (smiling optional!) on your Facebook profile. Thank you.

(A few people might be about the Un-Friend me now...)