Facebook is one of the most compelling applications that I’ve been using recently. And yet, it’s usability sucks.Why oh why can they get some things so right, like how easy it is to tag someone in a photo, and still get some things so so wrong: I can’t remember if I’ve friended someone or not, and Facebook just ain’t telling. How come I can update my status from Home and from Profile but it’s not even labeled the same? Why can’t I show my friends something cool that another friend posted but they’re not linked to? What’s with the email notifications of a comment posted that I then can’t find if I login without following the URL in the email? Dear Facebook, stop making it so hard on me, I heart you.And why would I want to vote on an advertisement? I can see how powerful that is for advertisers but what do I get out of it? Nada.For as much as I can do on Facebook there is just as much that I want to and can’t.What’s the solution? There’s too little differentiation among the various views of content - and little value that I can discern from my usage to offer a logical reason other than some engineer thought it’d be cool to put the same stuff up again wrapped a little bit differently. Sometimes GUI designs promoted from the engineering team are a bad idea, sometimes they’re great.I think another indicator that the GUI was heavily influenced by engineers is the Status and Comment function. This type of inline commenting is typical of what you’d see if you read annotated code with notes from the engineers - and I’ve seen it a lot when I get emails from engineers.  It’s actually a really great way to provide a logical context to an electronic communication. But it subverts the paradigm that has been established by email clients for the past 15 years that most users are accustomed to - it doesn’t give them what they expect. And I’d guess that the ubiquity of Facebook may push that paradigm over.  It just hasn’t happened yet.