Pros & Cons
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- Almost everyone you know is on it.
- Improved navigation.
- Less-obnoxious ads.
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- Limited personalization, skinning options.
- In IE, can't move content where you want.
- Applications more hidden than before.
When 90 million people use your site to keep track of close and not-so-close friends, a site redesign such as the one Facebook recently undertook can create a lot of upheaval. In fact, when the new look was first shown, people complained about changed locations of content in the project's own forum. Still, I find the new changes to be mostly for the better. The addition of tabs, a combined updates feed, and the Publisher for new posts are real improvements. Making applications less intrusive and more integrated seems to have been a major goal, and lot of application icon clutter has been removed. Ads, too, have been toned down. If you're really attached to the old Facebook, not to worry: You can switch back to the old format. But in my opinion, the service should have gone a bit further, adding more ways for you to personalize what ought to be a very personal page.
Home Page Changes
The most immediately noticeable modification is the disappearance, on the home page, of the left column, which used to show all your application icons next to your feeds at the center of the page. The new two-column layout, with a larger right column, gives your Facebook page a less cluttered feel. This change has the benefit of removing one of the more obnoxious ad locations from the page. The enlarged sidebar on the right is set off more clearly than before, with curved edges. Application bookmarks appear below Requests and status updates, while Pokes (those digital nudges to Friends you don't really have anything to say to) have been pushed down from their former, more prominent, position. These changes go quite a way toward improving skimmability.
The main menu choices, too, have changed. Most significantly, you'll now find a main menu choice for Applications. This is a huge improvement over the clutter of apps you used to see in the left column. The "Profile" menu choice has been replaced with your own name. This more clearly shows that the option takes you to your profile, not that of the user whose pages you're visiting. It's not a big change, but it does make the site friendlier for newbies.
The down arrows for sub-choices under Friends and Inbox have vanished. Previously, those under Friends let you see all friends (or subsets of them) and jet to acquaintances' status updates. Instead, new submenu choices let you issue e-mail invites and find new friends. Those under the Inbox menu give you a choice for composing new messages, as well as viewing sent messages, notifications, and updates. These changes simplify the interface but also add an extra navigation step if you want to perform one of the actions formerly offered by the submenu choices, so they're really a bit of a mixed bag, in my opinion.
Just below the main menu is another big change in your Facebook home page. Before, you'd just see the big News Feed list of your friends' activities, but now the top things on the page below the main menu are the thumbnail of your own profile picture, along with choices to update your status, add photos and video, share a link, or write a note. This last nudges Facebook a little bit further into blogging territory. In general, this part of the new Facebook is an improvement to the old arrangement of having your profile picture thumbnail and status update off to the side. It does, however, make for some redundancy with your Profile page.
Like the Home page, the new Friends page loses the left column of apps and ads, but on this page, what was formerly the right-hand column—lists, Find Friends, and Subscribe, for receiving friends' updates via RSS—has moved into the left-hand position. It's not a huge change, but it works.—
A New Profile
The Profile page gets the biggest transformation in this redesign—tabs, a new Publisher area, and the integrated updates feed—most of which I'd consider improvements. As on the home page, the left panel of applications is gone (along with the accompanying ad). What was the second column but has now become the first column looks nearly the same: It still shows your picture, networks, a few friends, photos, and links.
Highest on the list of major changes is the new tabbed interface, with tabs for Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes (more on these in a moment), and a Plus sign that lets you add more tabs for applications you use often. By default, you're in the Wall tab, in which, just below the tab bar, is what Facebook refers to as The Publisher. This new feature streamlines adding status updates, writing notes, adding media, and the sharing of links. It's basically a text entry area with options for all these activities. Applications can hook into the Publisher, too. For example, my account had actions for FunWall and SuperPoke. This is an example of how apps have become more deeply embedded into the interface, though less intrusive.
Below the Publisher (assuming you've left the default Wall tab activated) is your updates feed. This has been tweaked as well, and the biggest change here is that updates, wall posts, notifications, and friend and fan adds are now all lumped together. I think this is a good change, saving you from having to hunt around for all your latest activities and page down for your wall. Another improvement is that when you hover the mouse pointer over any entry, an edit icon appears to the right in the form of a pencil eraser, letting you limit the entry to one line or short entry, or even to delete it.
The second tab, Info, combines what was formerly at the top of your Profile page and in your Information box—a nice reduction of clutter, as you don't really need to see these details that don't often change—sex, e-mail address, and so on. The Photos tab hardly needs explanation: It displays your albums, comments in them, and lets you set album privacy levels.
The Boxes tab takes you to where a lot of the clutter added by applications you've installed in your Facebook account has gone. Every application you've allowed gets a box, and the page can get pretty deep and ugly. If you're using a browser other than Internet Explorer, you can move the boxes up and down in order and between the wide left and narrow right column, in a nice new move towards flexibility.—
Applications Get Easier
The way you add applications has also changed, and it makes more sense. In fact, you no longer even need to add them explicitly. Before, you got six check boxes for what you'd allow the app to access—the first was "Allow this application to know who I am and access my information." Often I'd try to uncheck this, only to be told that doing so would mean I wouldn't be able to install the app. Why didn't it say that in the first place, I always wondered. Well, now it does: When you start installing an app, you'll see a simple Allow Access window, with the option of canceling.
The new Applications menu choice at the top of every Facebook page merely shows apps you've used, with the most recent on top. When you're inside one, the Edit option from the main Applications menu choice activates, and you can decide whether the app can publish stories on your wall, add itself to your Boxes, or create a bookmark for itself.
Be warned, though, that not all existing applications play well with the new site. Several apps I tried installing refused to play ball, offering different but equally unsatisfactory results. Some put me in an endless loop of "you must add this to your profile"—in the new procedure, you don't add applications, you just permit them and use them. Others offered no button to get started using them, and others still (most informatively) displayed an error page saying "There are still a few kinks Facebook and [the makers of this app] are trying to iron out." In fact more apps that I tried to add in the new interface didn't work than did.
The design changes, while not drastic, improve Facebook's look, making it more skimmable and easier on the eyes. But I'm still surprised that a service that's all about sharing your personality allows virtually no personalization in terms of colors, backgrounds, and the like.
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Final Thoughts
Facebook.com
The insider's social network gets a much-needed but mild redesign that boosts clarity, though it still offers little in the way of interface personalization.