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Facebook Redesign Causes Outrage

25 October 2009 13 Comments

This past weekend, Facebook rolled out a few new additions and changes to the website, yet no users had any idea that these changes were coming. The first change was the removal of the Highlights section, which shows what your friends have recently done while you were offline or what’s popular among them. Facebook also changed their News Feed, splitting it into two sections: Live Feed and News Feed. However, many members feel these changes are not for the better, and even some groups wanting the changes reversed have appeared, growing by hundreds of users per hour. So, why such a huge fuss over such “minor” tweaks?

Facebook hasn’t been known to make large amounts of design changes to their website, and when they have, it wasn’t a huge deal. However, the News Feed separation seems to be creating the most dissatisfaction. The Live Feed shows everything your friends are doing now, while the News Feed is for older events from the days before. Many say this is a small replication of the Twitter stream and so users who may not have been able to access the website for a day or two can catch up on the best news and updates from the previous day. However, many people disagree and prefer the old feed just the way it was and hate the new design, but it did not cause a significant traffic drop.

This displays the News Feed section, which shows older posts. The Live Feed, blank in the image, would show posts friends make while you’re online or throughout the course of the day.

Although Facebook executives plan to keep things the way they are, many users are still sending in their complaints. Many are comparing this to the dramatic changes made to MySpace that caused many users to leave or spending less time on the site, but many aren’t expecting people to leave over something like this. There are also rumors that Facebook will make more changes to profiles and their design by December, but there has been no conformation thus far.

Personally, I don’t like these changes, although change is important when you’re a site of this magnitude.

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13 Comments »

  • S.Pradeep Kumar said:

    Exactly.. It was really confusing for me.. Live news feed, status update.. ahh.. It took me lot of time to realize the reason ! :D

  • Dinesh said:

    Facebook’s new desing is not accepted by loads of people check this out

    http://www.teentechguru.com/facebooks-new-feature-live-feed-view-not-accepted/

  • Simon | Teenius said:

    Personally I really don’t like the changes. I like the motto ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’, and the old FB was fine! :(

  • Een Rockstar said:

    It sucks..Hope they changed back to the previous one…

  • Amar (author) said:

    @Dinesh Thats a nice post

    @Simon Yeah I liked the old facebook as well

    @Een I am hoping that as well

  • Maneel said:

    I feel the new changes have taken away the human feel of facebook. Its more machine/robot-like now. Sucks for me.

  • Steve said:

    Hey I just wanted to say yes I think Facebook has made some critical errors in their choices of change. It seems they should have gotten more input from the customers, the Facebook users themselves.

    Also, I wanted to say I really like your blog. There are some really great articles on here.

    I will bookmark you blog and start reading your articles. Very interesting.

    Steve

  • Amar (author) said:

    @Steve First of all welcome to this blog and i am really glad you like this blog and now you have turned to my regular reader. Thanks a lot for that

    Yeah i agree facebook should have used some user polls or something before making out the changes but now lets hope they do something soon

  • C.A. Simmons said:

    Hey Amar what’s up? I personally hate the new Facebook changes. I could deal with it if the live feed was the default setting but forcing me to look at old post that are usually no longer relevant to me is a bit annoying.

    Also, am I the only one that noticed that FB is much slower and crashes a lot more. I swear that over the past month I have had to refresh my page multiple times on more than one occasion. That sucks.

  • Amar (author) said:

    @C.A. Simmons Hey not much with me mate, Just blogging. Even I do hate the new facebook changes and to be honest even my facebook crashed few times dont know why

  • C.A. Simmons said:

    Facebook is now suffering from the Yahoo effect. They’re basically trying to be good a way too many things at the same time and it’s bringing down the quality of the experience in all the things they were originally good at.

    Google and Twitter are really all I need in my social life, but I’m addicted to Mafia Wars and Farmville on FB so I stay… lol. So much to consider.

  • Amar (author) said:

    @C.A. Yeah they wanna be best in everything, they launched their own ads platform and I hope they dont launch something like youtube.. LOL

  • Jonathan Sprague said:

    As many have said, I was in favor of the old design, I felt facebook caused alot of issues for themselves that they didn’t need to cause, although maybe they knew that people would never be able to not use facebook and any coo would soon end

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