This time, though, the changes have done more than ruffle a few feathers; they’ve practically plucked the chickens.
A poll run by the social media news blog Mashable found that 75 percent of Facebook fans “hate” the redesign. The new Facebook fared even worse on the poll site Sodahead, where 86 percent gave the changes a thumbs down.
Of course, any time a company with 800 million active customers makes a change, a certain predictable percentage of them go ballistic. The wails of protest have become just another cherished phase of the cycle. If you don’t like change, technology may be the wrong field for you.
Do the Facebook changes justify all the teeth-gnashing? Here’s a rundown of what’s come out recently, and what’s coming soon — and one man’s verdict on each one’s true wail-worthiness.
THE TIMELINE The new Facebook Timeline view is still in private testing; you, the public, won’t get to see it for a couple more weeks. For now, it’s optional. Eventually, it will replace your existing Profile page — thus the griping. But this time, change is good.
In essence, it’s a timeline of your life, depicted on a vertically scrolling page. Now is at the top; your birth is at the bottom. Facebook generates it automatically, using your recent news and life events to populate it; the farther back you go in time, the more Facebook condenses events. You can manually expand or compress various phases of your life, and you can manually add or remove events. (That’s fortunate. Otherwise, the entire period before you joined Facebook would be a big boring blank.)
Because the Timeline displays photos alongside the news and events of your life, it can eventually become a rich visual record of your life — or at least the parts you want to make public.
Now, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t see the appeal of Facebook in the first place — “Why on earth would I want to make the intimate details of my life public on the Internet!?” — then the Timeline will only amplify your bafflement.
But for regular Facebookers, the Timeline serves a real purpose. For example, if you got engaged a few months ago, only the Facebook regulars among your fans might know it. Oh, they could keep clicking More, More, More, to summon older and older posts you’d made — but how would they even know to do that?
Now there’s a way for them to see the arc of your life in a visual, entertaining way — a genuinely useful online tool that nobody’s carried out in quite this way before.
TOP STORIES The new Top Stories feature, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as successful.
If you haven’t visited your Facebook page in awhile, you’ll have missed a lot of your friends’ news updates — some of which might have been important. Facebook’s concern was that once those updates had scrolled away, you’d never know they existed.
Therefore, when you log in now, Facebook places stories it considers to be important right at the top — big stories you haven’t seen, no matter how old they are. Below these “important” posts, you’ll find the traditional, infinitely scrolling, strictly chronological list of news. (There were two similar lists before — Top Stories and Recent News — but you had to switch between them manually. Plenty of people never bothered, and missed important information as a result.)
Facebook fanatics object to the Top Stories scheme on several grounds. First, what constitutes “important”? Facebook says that it chooses Top Stories based on things like which of your friends posted them, how many Likes and Comments they’ve received, and so on. But some Facebookworms don’t like the idea that somebody else — Facebook’s algorithms — chooses which stories to put into this top-of-page area.
Second, the Top Stories concept means that you might see three-day-old stories above one-hour-old stories, which doesn’t seem quite right.
E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c11284d427d3d5f3469f130a583b9c65
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