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Well, my brief dalliance with Facebook lasted less than a week. In general, I've avoided MySpace and Facebook because there's simply nothing there of interest to me. But a friend had been playing Block Star, a Tetris game, on Facebook, and had found that none of her friends were able to come close to her score. So eventually, I gave in and create a Facebook account so I could play Tetris. Sure enough, I beat her high score, which gave her something to aim for. She was pleased. I was pleased. All was good.

But then, Block Star was withdrawn, and replaced with Tetris Friends. But the general consensus seems to be that Block Star was a much better game, and a lot of the Block Star players are now upset that their favourite game has been removed, with only an inferior and less playable version in its place. They're promising to implement some of the features that Block Star previously had in the coming weeks. But they're not there yet.

Of course, I wouldn't know about that, because I can't play it. Firstly, it's now in Java, rather than Flash. It seems that not only is it Java, but you need a Java 6 plugin, where I only had Java 5. WTF? You can quite easily write Tetris in Java 1.1. Why the need for the latest and greatest? Morons. But it gets better. My friend still wanted to see how I did on the new version, so I grabbed the new plugin, only to be told that I couldn't run the game anyway. You see, it doesn't work with Linux. There's a note on the first screen, explaining that it doesn't work on Macs either. So, Windows only then. Well done. Java's "write once, run anyway" mantra has never been true. But for a browser plugin? I'm sure you need some special talent to make an applet be platform specific.

Firstly, when you have a working application with a large base of happy users, replacing it with a substandard application is never a good idea. Yes, the new one uses the officially licensed Tetris engine and brand. Do you think any of the end users care about that? How do you think they feel about the Tetris brand now? At the very least, waiting until Tetris Friends was feature compatible with Block Star would have been a smart move. And the decision to move to Java 6, *and* to make it Windows only? Dumb.

Ho hum. Here endeth my Facebook experience.