Yet Another Facebook Redesign
Facebook has yet again changed the look and feel of their homepage. It’s not nearly as revolutionary as their worst change – adding News Feeds – but it’s enough to make a difference. This time, it allows you to switch between the “News Feed” and the “Live Feed.” The difference isn’t entirely clear, but basically the News Feed shows only those stories that Facebook thinks you would care about, while Live Feed shows everything.
The problem is that the features are increasingly useful when you have more friends, not so much when you have very few. Has Facebook forgotten what the average number of friends is? Last I checked, it was around 120. The problem is that only a few of these friends are likely to produce enough content for the Live Feed to be useful. And that means the News Feed is likely to be boring as well. Hardly enough stories will propagate it, making Facebook seem awfully dull.
Part of the beauty of Facebook is the ability to have extended conversations based on a single event, like new photos, a posted link, or a status update. This is a feature that Twitter doesn’t have, and it can make Facebook seem like it involves actual interaction with friends, rather than just random stalking. But when updates that are active get buried under a deluge of new content or fail to make it through the magic algorithm that fills the News Feed, you’re stuck. It doesn’t matter how many friends you have if meaningful interaction is buried under meaningless updates.
I don’t want Facebook to roll back to the old days when most changes involved adding a new band to your favorite music list. But I do think that Facebook needs to do some serious thinking about how the ordinary user navigates the site. Right now, their updates seem arbitrary, not carefully planned. In trying to stay ahead of how people use social media, Facebook forgets: the way people use Facebook is based on how the site lets them use it. The more changes they make, the more likely people are to switch whenever the next big thing comes around. Investors be wary; one more “upgrade” by the young and inexperienced Facebook design team may be the difference between a payday and a write-off.
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November 2nd, 2009 22:38
I was an ordinary user, as was my wife. We are both 50 and started FB awhile ago. I deactivated my account over the recent changes. My wife, who isn’t “that” web savvy loved the simplicity of FB has been extremely frustrated by the re-design. After reading what some of the FB PR about the changes, I decided I didn’t need to be told what everyone enjoyed. It comes down to this kind of example: I’m the only one in my circle of friends, roughly 100, probably a little under average, who enjoyed certian thing. Therefore I was the only one of to pay attention to certian FB pages. I don’t post on them, I just like to see updated. Occasionaly I mught have done a ‘like’ or maybe posted a ‘WTG!’ Well after the changes, I couldn’t find a way to get those back on my feed. According to FB if I wanted it show up, it has to be more popular somehow? That’s garbage. The other example is FB’s ‘Why not reconnect with…’ posts. I was starting to get annoyed that they were trying to tell me who I should be talking too. The last straw came when they told be I haven’t posted to ‘so and so’. I know exactly why I haven’t posted to it, it was for someone who hasn’t even been born yet!! I know why it was made, and, I know what it was there for, I used it for what it was intended for. It was never intended to be for connecting! The changes, the reasons behind it, and the lack of either announcements or help from FB were too much for me, I definitely don’t need that kind of aggrevation. If I see they make a change, so at least I can customize it the way I want, I may be back, if they don’t it’s thier loss, not mine, they are not the indispensible one. That’s me, the consumer.
November 3rd, 2009 09:57
Thanks for the comment, Tim.
Personally, I’ve found that Facebook is a lot more uninteresting since the change. You’re right about the algorithm used to populate the “News Feed.” It doesn’t seem to pick “stories” that I care about. And the “Live Feed” is mostly populated with information about who has become friends with whom, about which I couldn’t be less interested.
Thanks again for sharing your perspective.