Since you are reading an internet site, I’m going to assume you know that Facebook recently changed its look a bit. It did so for several good reasons, and generally the site is better for it. That, of course, has utterly failed to stop loads of idiots crying about it purely because they think nothing should ever change. Here, for example, is a TechCrunch post claiming, falsely, that 94% of users dislike the changes. This is based on a survey Facebook did. There are a number of reasons why it’s not interesting or useful information. The most interesting is probably that polling users is actually a massively unhelpful way of finding out what they like. People will report one behaviour and actually exhibit another, or they will report one belief or preference but act on an entirely different one. The only way to test these things is to run both options and see which is most successful. A less interesting reason that the 94% figure is nonsense is the survey’s response: 800,000 people voted, but Facebook claims to have over 175,000,000 users, so it would be more accurate to say that 0.3% of users hate the new look and 99.7% of users don’t care enough to register an opinion. Certainly I didn’t vote, and I rather like the new look. Also, people have only had a few days to get used to the new design, so it’s like asking someone from Sheffield if they’d rather use chopsticks or a fork.
This, in case you have forgotten, is what is now known as ‘The Old Facebook’ (source):
This is what the angry shouting Facebook Luddites are demanding be restored, despite the fact that when it was new, the same people hated it and demanded the return of the previous one. I don’t even remember what that one looked like.
Now that I’m used to the new look, I find the above rather cluttered. There’s a pointless separate feed for status updates, and the feed prioritises information like ‘Cassandra wrote on Dan’s wall’ when the real information is the message itself. The New Facebook prioritises that instead (unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly good to demonstrate this with on my feed at the moment):
This is, of course, just stolen wholesale from Twitter, and in some aspects too obviously so. (See also, the results page of Yahoo! Search, which looks offensively Google-like.) But it’s clean, and clear, and simple, which are important. It’s basically fine. That’s why 99.7% of people don’t apparently care about the change. But as with the last redesign, there’s a subtler change under the hood that goes along with it. Facebook was getting massively complicated. It needed simplifying, so now it’s almost like a richer version of Twitter (although the differences in implementation mean that in practice the two sites are really not much like each other).
The problem is that that’s not finished. It has to change more. The status updates are basically gone — I found that there’s now no distinction between updating your status and writing on your wall — but this means that while you can write long treatises on other peoples’ walls, you’re limited to Twitter-style bullet-points on your own. You’re expected to write a Note if you want more space, and the whole thing doesn’t feel coherent. Similarly, the ‘wall-to-wall’ thing (which has never worked in any real sense) still needs work. You can’t post the same thing to multiple walls, and while you can ‘comment’ on someone’s post on their own wall, the standard reply to their posting on your wall is to post on theirs, and that results in a limited one-to-one semi-public conversation with no clear links to tie it together. They’ve actually stolen some of Twitter’s most annoying flaws. They need to tie the whole thing together, remove the vestigal traces of the old ’status’ line (which frankly never made any sense), allow the same post to appear on multiple walls, and build a real wall-’reply’ feature. As part of that, they also need to deprecate the status-’comments’ system and tie up the ‘notifications’ thing, because I get annoyed at having two separate feeds.
Also, if Facebook are still intent on having ‘groups’, they need to make them more prominent: group discussions should appear in your home feed. Otherwise, it takes too long to check them all and conversation dies. It’s meant to be a social network — the groups are really not social. People use it as a way of endorsing statements, and there are far better ways of doing that. Lastly, the emails they send out when you get a message or a wall post are currently ‘from’ Facebook ‘re:’ John sent you a message, when they should be ‘from’ John ‘re:’ do you want to go to the cinema. This would integrate with Thunderbird and GMail’s threading features and be generally faster and easier to use. It would also blur the line slightly between email and Facebook messages — if I could reply to a Facebook message by replying to the message in GMail, that would be great. (If that happened, I’d also like to be able to have Facebook send me my own messages so that GMail would have a copy.)
The philosophy behind this design seems to be similar to a ‘rich-media Twitter’, and if they pursue that idea then Facebook could become a very friendly and easy site to use. Simple, clean, and consistent. And basically, nothing like this fucking stupid suggestion from Holy Taco:
This is a cutting satire of Facebook’s increasing clutter, which would perhaps be pretty clever were it not for the fact that there is now less stuff on the Facebook home page than there ever has been. It looks more consistent and coherent, and has clearly made steps in the direction diametrically opposite to what this alleged spoof version is attempting to parody.
In summary, if you prefer the old Facebook then that’s very probably reasonable. But if your reasons for holding it are sufficiently dumb then it absolutely is possible for an opinion to be flat out wrong. Whoever designed the above image, for example, hates the new Facebook for reasons that demonstrably make no sense, and while he (I presume he is a he) is quite entitled to do so, we would be well advised to ignore him until he starts talking sense.
