Facebook just works pretty darn well, though. The application is almost always responsive, it's extremely polished, and it's always getting a bit stronger in what it offers.
You're a lucky one I guess, or I'm unlucky. Facebook has constant little issues, whether it's just plain slow, the back button doesn't do anything, clicking a link doesn't do anything, chat is always on the fritz, or some other annoyance.
I certainly does _not_ work pretty darn well. A couple examples of high-impact bugs:
- Repeated posts in the news feed. The first ~10 posts or so in the news feed are repeated as you scroll down.
- In the news feed, if I see and play a video, it plays. Great. If I continue going down the feed and then click on a photo, it goes into the "theater" mode, and for some obscure reason, it plays the video again (except I cannot see it; I can only hear it). The only way to stop it is to exit theater mode. This keeps happening over and over again every time I enter theater mode. I am then forced to refresh the entire page if I want to see some pictures without distracting noise in the background.
These are just a couple examples; there are many more. After talking to some friends, it seems I'm not the only one experiencing them. Now, nobody's perfect. It's OK if these bugs got into production for a few days or even weeks before getting fixed. But it's been months now... For a company full of brilliant engineers, that is unacceptable.
Yes, it's odd. I agree with you, from my perspective, Facebook has 100% uptime and virtually no bugs. It's as good as Google (maybe better since GMail is often crappy for me.) It's clear that others see very different things. I wonder what the difference is?
(Now the Facebook iPhone app is really buggy, I will give you that.)
I'm curious as to what set of the features you use, because I seem to have chosen a set with the opposite experience: responsiveness is often spotty, polish is lacking, and the offering seems to be getting weaker if anything. That said, maybe the new offerings will help fix some of that, but I'm not particularly sanguine.
If that's underachieving, sign me up.