Off and on for the past 12 hours I tried (unsuccessfully) to access Facebook from my laptop computer.
You see, it was my daughter’s last day of kindergarten and I wanted to share the proverbial first and last day retrospective with my online friends. To my chagrin, every time I tried to launch the social media site in Google Chrome I
was g
reeted by a series of odd numbers and letters seemingly gelled together in a code of some sort.
I tried Internet Explorer and bam, I was able to access my account. Problem fixed … or so I thought.
I soon realized that while the site looked OK, photos would not upload and I could not post an update.
When I grabbed my mobile device the site opened as it normally does. I found the photos I needed from my gallery and posted them problem-free.
I chalked it up to my computer not working properly. But, anyone who knows me know that I obsess about, well, everything. I googled “Facebook down” and found that the site had high percentages of blackouts and uploading issues pretty much all day, according to DownDetector.com. The site also included a live outage map to show where users had reported Facebook issues.
Scrolling my feed via cell phone painted a different picture. It was as if the site had never even experienced a slight hiccup. Friends’ updates were there, as well as #TBT posts and the typical political rantings and ramblings.
So, the site loads and performs fine on mobile, but not desktop? Seems as if Facebook is putting its development dollars where the growing majority of its users – and therefore advertising revenues are – on mobile.
According to a recent report, 54 percent of Facebook users only access the social media network from their mobile device. On a daily basis, the site sees 989 million mobile daily active users. I am one of them, but I do like to access it from my computer as well.
Certainly as more people look to mobile devices for functions previously reserved for computers even fewer people will, like me, want to use laptops and desktop computers to post and engage on social media. I get it. With each technological advance something is left behind. I’m just not sure I’m ready to make my eyes go crossed staring at and scrolling through a 4.7-inch screen – even for the proverbial first and last day of school retrospective.
