Well, for those that have a Facebook account and actually use it on a regular basis, you may have noticed that it has changed a bit. The home page is looking different, groups and pages have had a face lift, and everyone’s thumbnail picture now has rounded edges so you can’t cut yourself.
Personally, I think Facebook needs to lose the safety scissors and get down to the thorns in facebook.
Just taking problems from the new update, I can tell you at least 3 things wrong:
Pages: You find a product or a company that you want to become a fan of. You search say “Lift Off”, and you see a few results. You see a random company, then the page for the TV show you remember from the 90’s. You see the little ‘Join Group’ on the side of the results. Not wanting to join a group without reading its content, you dive into the group, thinking to see a description, a nice big picture on the right hand side, a few discussion threads, and some wall posts. You click through and.. there’s nothing there. Literally, nothing. You see one or two recent activity points where someone created the page and did nothing else. That’s it. You actually have to click the ‘Just Fans’ link just below the ‘Write Something…” combo box to even see the wall posts. And it takes another click to see anything that was previously right in front of you before when you clicked through to a group, that stuff being ‘Information’. A tad annoying, but users will have to deal.
Next, groups: you click through to a group, say the Manu Feildel Appreciation Society. And.. nothing’s changed. Not only have we now a section that hasn’t changed, but it’s not improved. It’s the only ‘box-y’ type of thing left in Facebook. Everything else has been hedged with safety scissors, but not any of the Ye-Olde-Groups. A reminder of facebook’s past that won’t be removed any time in the not to distant future? Who knows..
Finally, friends. I loved how you could list friends. You could customise things so your old highschool buddies could see your pictures but not your wall, or you could limit anyone you work with to just basic information, so you can’t unintentionally leak out your actual whereabouts on Friday arvo after that long pub lunch through a status message. However, apart from being able to collect people in little boxes, you can’t do much else. You can’t see who’s in boxes and who’s not. It would take a very long time to sort through every single person and work out that I’ve missed 2 highschool buddies from any list what so ever, and therefore they haven’t been experiencing the entire glasnt facebook experience.
Mind you, they’ve removed the friends limit of 5000 maximum. That just means more street parties for Kevin Rudd.