Why Is Facebook So Hard to Use?

I am not a big fan of Facebook. True, it puts me in touch with many friends, but the application itself is so awful! It is always so hard to find anything and everything. Many times I've simply wanted to go to the a friend's page. My options have been:

• Remember the friend's Facebook page's URL
• Search for the friend (even though he/she is already in my friends list!)
• Hope to strike it lucky in the "News Feed": maybe she/he has an update visible and I can just click on their name (woo hoo!)

Nothing about Facebook is simple or immediately obvious. There is the "Home" page and the "Profile" page. Even the News Feed isn't simple: there's Top News and Recent News. OMG! Why all the clutter?

Today I decided that enough was enough and set out to do some research. On the "Profile" page there's a small section on the left that lists one's friends. This section has a little bit of text that reads something like "xx friends" (where xx is the number of friends you have). Hovering my mouse over this link showed "http://www.facebook.com/friends/?id=XXX...&view=everyone" in the status bar of my browser. Eliminating the "id=XXX..." part, I tried the link http://www.facebook.com/friends/?view=everyone and it worked! This link shows me a simple list of my friends.

This simple list of friends was all I wanted.

The simpler link http://www.facebook.com/friends/ (i.e., without the "?view=everyone" part) will once again only show you a million ways to find new friends, but no list of existing friends. So Facebook apparently thinks that the default action for a URL like http://www.facebook.com/friends/ should be to help find new friends—that's idiotic!

What is the reason for keeping this list so well-hidden? Should I only ever be trying to find new friends and not be able to find the friends I already have? On the "Home" page too if I click on "Friends" (on the left hand side), instead of listing my friends (as the name of the link would seem to imply), once again Facebook shows me a gazillion ways to find new friends. Stupid!

Almost every time I use Facebook, I end up getting frustrated.

As far as I am concerned, Facebook's current UI is very badly designed (from a usability perspective) and their priorities are all wrong—I am much more likely to want to interact with an existing friend than to go looking for new friends.

If not for the fact that all my friends are on Facebook (and expect to find me there), I would have long since ditched Facebook.