Facebook's New Front Page Looks DOA
Facebook gave its homepage a makeover ... again. This Facebook user is not impressed.
Ed Oswald, TechnologizerOct 26, 2009 7:59 am
For a market-leading company, Facebook's moves sometimes are so half-baked that it's practically mind-numbing. The latest example of this is the site's new home page. For whatever reason, Facebook has tweaked the news feed to become more of a "top stories" format than a chronological timeline of your friend's activities.(If you're curious, here is why the company says the change was so necessary.)
Oh yes, you still can get the old layout, but that's now something you have to click through for and is called "Live Feed." The site has attempted to make up for this by making that feed actually real-time: you no longer have to reload for the latest updates.
This was sprung on users without any warning at all. I initially thought Facebook was choking yet again when I noticed the status updates were all jumbled up. I actually didn't realize there was a change until I noticed a news article highlighted on Techmeme.
Apparently, neither did most of my friends. "What the hell is wrong with Facebook now?" one said. Those that did notice what just happened were not much kinder. "This new layout sucks!" was a common meme.
Now Facebook groups are popping up demanding the old news feed come back. One called "Facebook: SWITCH BACK TO THE OLD NEWS FEED!!!" has garnered some 648,000 members in just two days. Another has about 440,000 members, and yet a third with over 51,000 users.
Such rapid opposition signals to me that Facebook is going to have a lot of trouble keeping this around. But it also should be a concern to those with interests in the social networking company: it is repeatedly making questionable decisions that really seem as if they are not being thought out very well.
Facebook has grown exponentially as MySpace has collapsed. But at the same time, MySpace seemed to think through changes before it made them, or realized that sometimes it's good to leave things alone.
I see no good reason why Facebook needed to mess with the news feed. To begin with, this Twitter-like layout wasn't really popular with its users, and now they've messed with it again in a move that seems to have significant opposition.
If they keep doing this, Facebook's time at the top may not be long-lived. In the end the customer is always right.
Source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/174317/facebooks_new_front_page_looks_doa.html?tk=nl_dnx_h_crawl
Windows Live: Friends get your Flickr, Yelp, and Digg updates when they e-mail you.
http://ya-mujeeb.com/
At Facebook, one of our main priorities is helping you stay on top of what is going on with the people and things you care about most. That's why today we are beginning to roll out some changes to the home page that simplify your experience by offering two views of News Feed: a summary view of the most interesting activity that's happened in the last day and a real-time view that shows you what is happening right now.
ReplyDeleteYou will be able to catch up on what you may have missed while you were away from Facebook and then easily switch to the real-time stream when you want to see posts as soon as they're shared. Here's how it works:
News Feed
When you log into Facebook, you'll see the most interesting things that happened in the last day in the "News Feed" view. News Feed picks stories that we think you'll enjoy based on a variety of factors including how many friends have liked and commented on it and how likely you are to interact with that story.
Live Feed
Once you've caught up on what you missed, you can click through to "Live Feed" to see what's happening right now. As long as you remain logged into Facebook, you'll continue to see posts and activity from your friends in real-time. You can edit what appears in this view by clicking "Edit Options" at the bottom of the home page.
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=162536657130