The last few weeks there has been some major revisions to the Facebook interface. Until very recently you could switch back to the “old” view, but now that has been taken away. So, users are left with the new version. And some don’t like it. I browsed through some of the entries at “iF YOU HATE NEW FACEBOOK JOIN THIS GROUP”. Here are some of the more interesting feedback:
Chris from ON says: Don’t like it. why do people insist on fixing things that don’t need to be fixed?
Rich from DC says: This version sucks! Apps don’t work right, you can’t arrange the page to look the way you want it to, I want my feed and my wall separate. What seriously was the need to redesign? who ever came up with this design has no clue what’s going on.
Mary from Notre Dame says: I agree– the new layout seems more like an email server like gmail or yahoo than a social networking site. A networking site should be more personal and less busy. The current Facebook is well laid out, kind of newspaper-style, which is clean and organized, whereas the new format is jumbled and cluttered. When a person’s outgoing activity and incoming messages are all put into a single column– doesn’t that seem like a downgrade in organization?
Joel from Plymouth says: It’s hard to navigate, some of the functionality seems to have gone the ‘wall’ tab is horrendously confusing and has like 3 sub-levels of tabs!, the custom tabs only remain temporarily (don’t know if that’s a browser issue, i use Firefox 3), retrieving information is damn near impossible, it’s much slower, the new space has been used poorly, the apps. seem to have been completely lost thereby losing the customised feel of your page, lots of the modules can’t be moved, it’s not like they’re letting you create custom tabs for other people to browse and finally there is more advertising on this version.
This is only a sampling of the many coments on this group page. I only took the ones which I thought were constructive and provided relevant feedback to the team. There are lots of entries on this group page that just say “new FB sucks” or something to that effect. As of this writing 185 users had left negative comments. This not a huge number compared to 100 million users. Not even a drop in the bucket. But I’m not aware of any more groups out there and there could be many more.
Even so, the redesign appears to be a business decision aimed at gaining long term sustainability. Some are speculating that this redesign is a way to compete as the “Operating System of the Internet”. Some are pointing to the recent attempts by Facebook to gain traction with advertisers- a key source of revenue. And at the end of the day isn’t that what this is all about. Like everyone else Facebook needs to make money.
It’ll be interesting to see if and how Facebook ever responds to those who don’t like this change.