So after five days working with Facebook, I’m mostly impressed. I have a few minor nits with the user interface, but it may be that they want the UI to be somewhat mysterious. I think they want you to explore, and if things are just a little bit wonky, you’ll be more apt to wander around blindly and stumble into things that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.
The other day I was seriously impressed with the ease of building and maintaining a photo album. But today I’m having the weirdest problem adding a picture to an existing album. This picture won’t upload:
I realize that it’s not the greatest thing ever carved, but somehow I don’t think that’s the reason Facebook is rejecting it. Their Java-based file uploader happily reports, “File upload successful!” But the picture never appears in my album. The “simple file uploader” fails with this message:
File bamboo.jpg: This error occurred because either the photo was a size we don’t support or there was a problem with the image file.
Granted, the size is a little bit odd (192 x 582), but there are other odd-sized files in that album. I’ve tried resizing the picture, changing it to a .png file, renaming it, etc. All to no avail. Facebook simply will not accept this photo.
On a related note, Facebook is not working well with my new Firefox 3.0.11 update. I’ve had one hang, one unexplained disappearance (Firefox just exited), and some pretty bizarre behavior. I wonder what’s going on.
Update 2009/06/29
I played with it a bit more, resizing the image, saving it with different photo editor programs, and even changing the color as one commenter suggested in order to get past a possibly over-Freudian image filter. Nothing worked. I finally ended up using the entire picture that includes some background (wires and other junk on my desk) in addition to the carving. That worked. I don’t know why.