sending...

I heard that Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, is worth about $6 billion.

Tell me, Mark, after having gotten the whole country hooked on your remarkably effective social network, after having bought loads of servers to support all the gagillions of photos and videos being shared, not to mention all the programming and technical support that must go on non-stop, and after becoming filthy freaking rich so that no one in your line of posterity will ever have to work ever again until the second coming....

After all that, you can't spare a little pocket change, and by that I mean like a million dollars, to create a chat program that doesn't completely suck?

Honestly, how long does it take for computers these days to send this line of text to each other:

"Hey dude, wasssup?"

How many ones and zeros is that? Like 30 or 40? Even on a slow day, when my connection is only giving me 1 KB per second, thus 1,000 bits per second, by my calculations it should take a grand total of .04 seconds. Am I wrong?

Why, then, is it necessary to sit there and do nothing for like a whole minute while I just read an obnoxious little "sending..." note? Or if you have the pirate translation, "firing..."

Nevermind that it's almost always one-way, so one person sits there getting angry at life, trying to respond while the other person's messages are coming through just fine.

Or when it happens to the other person it just looks like they're typing for like 3 minutes straight, and you're all like, "oh sweet, I hope it's good... whatever they're typing... I hope it's amazing..." and it just ends up being this:

"yeah."

And THEN, when your message does get through, they never seem to be in the right order. And it's a miracle if they all make it through to begin with. And it's even worse when it will get stuck on one message and send the rest of them, and then send that one message like 2 minutes later when it's completely irrelevant, or worse, completely out of context.

Sure, you have millions of people chatting all at the same time, I understand that. So why not just send an email to AIM, or Google, and be like,

"so, hey, uh, this is Facebook. Just wondering what you did to make your chat program function like it was built sometime after the 70's. Just get back to me when you get a chance. Thanks."

I'm sure they'd be willing to help out. We're all in this together.


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