New Facebook Redesign More Than Aesthetic

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1. Josh Ben-Levy
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 2:07 am

   I like this design. Social-RSS…

2. Sam
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 2:13 am

   Although interesting and certainly useful, I’ve currently found that there’s actually no way to change your privacy settings such that you turn off this news feed (I’m not sure I want my friends to know the history of all the wall messages I’ve posted on, or the precise moment I’ve changed from in a relationship to single, etc.) - the only way to do so is to manually delete each news entry after you’ve done the act… a bit tedious at this point…

   I’m mixed as to how much I like this change, although it’s good to see facebook still innovating.

3. Yehudah Goldstein
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 2:22 am

   There should be some customization options.

4. Jessep
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 2:23 am

   I think Facebook “gets it” more than any other popular SN site on the web.

   Kudos to them on their new features.

5. Adam
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 2:51 am

   I agree with Sam, there should be a way to turn it off. It just seems to flashy and annoying to be on the Home page. I’d rather just see my profile.

6. LL
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 3:03 am

   quite unlike anything you can find on the web?

   why don’t you log into friendster and look under friend updates, this feature was launched last september.

   then a few months later, linkedin jumped on the bandwagon - go to their homepage and look under the inbox.

   hmmm, not a whole lot of innovation here, surprised it took facebook this long to catch up, not exactly moving at lightning speed are you, zuckerberg?

7. Sal
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 4:35 am

   The new social feed feature is extremely invasive and there does not seem to be a way to turn it off. You can manually delete the feed entries from your profile page, but that is quite tedious.

   Facebook is one huge privacy nightmare. Not only does it urge you to divulge as many details as possible about your private life, but it is making it increasingly easier for other users to track you. The friend approval system will prevent some of this, but people rarely reject requests. Additionally every person that went to your university is by default your friend, whether you know them or not…

8. Daniel
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 4:51 am

   This will make other college students (my friends) think way more carefully before doing normal facebook-esque things that they may not appreciate everyone knowing about… ie signing 10 walls in 2 minutes or flirting shamelessly with a girl other than one’s girlfriend (using wall posts etc).

   Also, people don’t really care about changes to many of their “friends” facebook profiles because they aren’t really friends.

   Downgrade.

9. Mike
   

   September 5th, 2006 at 5:03 am

   Speak for yourself, Daniel. I use facebook to keep up with real friends and it’s nice that I can actually identify what changes have been made to a profile. I’m not saying that everyone is like me, but not everyone falls under your sweeping generalization.

10. cuneyt
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 5:33 am

    Smells like Vox’s Neighborhood.

11. David Askaripour
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 5:41 am

    I agree… although these new features are definitely slick and nice to see… it’s really, really, going to turn a lot of people off from doing their daily business on facebook such as writing on walls, poking, and flirting with a million people… people simply don’t want others privy to that sort of info. There should have been custom settings in place before they rolled this out. I’m not too sure if facebook users are savvy enough to figure it out yet, but once they do…. it’s going to anger a lot of ‘em! And it’s going to hinder communication, not increase it. Overall, great additions.

    Dave of Mind Petals

12. JR
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 5:46 am

    isn’t some of that like Y!360’s friend-update thing?

13. chris
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 6:09 am

    This brings creeping to a whole new level…

    it’s really annoying at best — do I care if a friend of mine posted on some random persons wall? no.

14. mesattack
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 6:26 am

    How FB has gotten this far is unbelievable to me. The site is poorly designed at best, advertising does not convert (+ crappy ctrs), total lack of innovation, little global movement (even with Huge money from Accel), ++++++

    I think they should have taken the $750 million and got out of town.

15. mojaam
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 6:31 am

    Either people are too paranoid of the “what-ifs” and the “I’m not sure” or I’m just apathetic about these. Until I start hearing terrible stories that occur due to this change, I don’t see anything wrong with it. As far as pageviews, I actually think it might increase it rather than decrease it; when you hear a friend is going to an event, you might want to click that event for more information now that you otherwise will never hear of.

16. Anshul
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 6:33 am

    These changes are pretty cool and would definitely increase facebook’s overall value among its users.

17. Facebookr
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 7:35 am

    “Either people are too paranoid of the “what-ifs” and the “I’m not sure” or I’m just apathetic about these.”

    It doesn’t matter if the concerns are valid, if users perceive problems, you have a problem.

    And a lot of sites have been doing this sort of thing, so it’s hardly revolutionary. The guy who said these are quite unlike anything you can find on the web must be using only Facebook for the past year.

18. Don Wilson
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 7:37 am

    My god this is an awesome upgrade. What will they think of next?

19. Will Pate
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 7:57 am

    The similarities between what we’re working on for what we call “People” in Flock and the News Feed that Facebook just launched are striking. It will be interesting to see what kind of feedback comes from their implementation.

20. Nick Pang
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 8:23 am

    interesting that if page views and time spent on the site is no longer the ‘currency’, what should be the new metrics? user satisfaction? how do we compare social networking sites?

21. Dingle
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 8:32 am

    Friend’ster had this feature for almost a year. So has Yahoo 360. This is not an innovation, and not particularly newsworthy.

22. TanNg
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 8:38 am

    The “news feed” concept is on Yahoo360 for quite a long time.

23. Peter
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 8:45 am

    Definitely a nice update, though I think the news feed can almost be too overloaded with information. Settings would be nice to control what’s displayed.

24. Ben Werdmuller
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 8:47 am

    I take exception to the assertion that “they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.”

    The combination of granular access restrictions, friend activity aggregation and aggregation of activity on your account - together with blogs, files, photos, podcasting, social networking, customisation, wider RSS aggregation and tagging - has been available in Elgg for around two years. Elgg is open source, has no advertising, and is a platform that can be run on infrastructure owned by an institution or student organisation. Within a month it will also support OpenID for decentralised communication and participation.

25. Anthony
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 8:49 am

    Cool feature… BUT HOW CAN I TURN IT OFF!!!!!!!!!!

26. Jason L. Baptiste
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:13 am

    It’s all about Information Flow. Personally, I’m a fan of the feature. The real question is, will the other 7.5 million college students put up with it? Yes, the privacy settings for it, is one click away, but we all know how hard it is to get users to add even “more more click” to their lives. Should be interesting to watch.

    -JLB

27. Realist
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:14 am

    Dan Wilson and Andrew Smith are now lovers. 1:29am

    Kevin McCormick added new photos. 1:10am
    Random pics from the Gamma Phi lesbian orgy…

    Dan Wilson joined the group UC Berkeley Rainbow Coalition. 1:09am

    Ximena Hernandez removed her drunken profile picture. 9:22pm

    Bobby Williams wrote a new note. 9:22pm
    It’s a tough life.
    I was at a party this Saturday over at Yale. I thought things between Mandy and I were good. We’ve been going out for a month. She said she had to run to the Hamptons to see her dying cousin. Wentworth, Bartholomew and I hit the Psi Upsilon frat party. We get there and low and behold, there’s Mandy getting wild with one of Yale’s football players…

    Jeremey Hayes committed suicide. 7:45pm

    Jeremey Hayes left the group Harvard Honor Roll Students. 7:28pm

    Daniel Jones added “smoking blunts and playing video games” to his favorite activities. 7:08pm

    Daniel Jones is now single. 6:48pm

28. Andrew
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:24 am

    Realist, yes! ;D

29. susan a
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:32 am

    Friendster, Yahoo360, LinkedIN have had this for awhile. Realist — love your post!

30. Andrew B
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:36 am

    Not sure I get how people are saying this isn’t revolutionary. Features like mini-feed may exist elsewhere but nothing like News Feed exists. It isn’t just a log of your friends actions it picks the stories you are most likely to want to see based on your behavior on the site.

    I also don’t get how people think it is so creepy given that NOTHING is visible that wasn’t visible before. We aren’t exposing anything new, just doing a better job of exposing what was already visible. If people don’t want information to be so public, they should send messages instead of posting on walls and use privacy to limit visibility of photo albums and such.

    Finally, if you don’t care about a story, then maybe you shouldn’t be friends with the person involved! Seriously, Facebook’s value is more than random flirtation, it is in connecting real people who care about each other online.

31. Tom
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:46 am

    As a user I’m kind of turned off to it now. I know it wasn’t hard for someone else to go through my pages and see who else I had been talking to, but now everything i do on it is spoon fed to everyone who logs in.

    As a friend just said to me “Why do you need to know that much?”. I know, because you can, but still..

    Just my opinion.

    Good article though.

32. Andrew Simons
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:46 am

    Join the online group “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)”.

33. carlo
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:47 am

    Andrew there is a huge difference between “visible” and “promoted on all my friend’s homepages”.

    As everyone has said, nothing new, been done all over the place. Facebook is just moving their homepage away from the static dashboard that it has been. Behind the trend, not ahead of it. Next…

34. Steve
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 9:58 am

    “These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.”

    That’s a joke…other sites, like LostCherry.com, have had an instant alert feature for at least half a year. LostCherry.com makes nice use of AJAX to make all interactivity instantaneous from a user’s homepage.

35. Realist
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 10:00 am

    Back by popular demand. The saga continues:

    Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the wall for the group $2 BILLION OR BUST. 6:25pm

    Mark Zuckerberg has poked all the hot girls on Facebook. 6:14pm

    Daniel Jones tagged Christie Harris in one photo. 6:01pm
    “SLUT!!!” for “Pic of me and my new gf Jenna”

    Willy Franks commented on Tara Henley’s photo “Can you really see my nipple in this pic?” 5:47pm

    Denice James joined the group Professor Hank’s Female Only Tutoring Group. 5:20pm

    Christie Harris wrote a new note. 5:11pm
    I hate guys!!
    I hate guys. They pretend like they love you but when push comes to shove, they just hurt you and only care about themselves. When I met Daniel in PSY 1703 (Human Sexuality) I thought he was the perfect guy. Nice, caring, generous. He was so into me the first time we made love in the dorms. Everything changed when I got pregnant…

    Christie Harris is now single. 5:05pm

    Christie Harris had an abortion. 4:21pm

    Christie Harris and Daniel Jones were seen arguing in Annenberg Hall. 3:24pm

    Irene O’Conner has joined the group Homework for Sale - Fast Turnaround. 3:05pm

    Irene O’Conner has woken up. 2:55pm

36. Romeo
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 10:23 am

    Andrew B:

    Based on your comments, it appears you work for Facebook? A suggestion: don’t argue with your users. Telling your users what they want is a huge business mistake. Effective companies let their users them tell them what they want. It’s very surprising that a company with a huge staff and lots of funding would apparently roll out a new feature that one could reasonably expect to be controversial without polling users, doing focus groups or at the very least giving users the option to turn it off.

    Also telling them how to use your service (don’t do this, do this instead) is extremely dumb. Are you that out of touch with how your users utilize Facebook?

    Facebook may have more value than random flirtation, but it’s naive to think that flirtation/hooking up isn’t one of the most popular uses of the service.

    And while you’re here, I’d just like to extend a big thanks to the entire Facebook team. It has made getting laid in college so much easier. In fact, this past weekend I hooked up with some hot Sigma Kappa girls in Chico all thanks to your service! If you could add some feature that enables guys to rate how easy girls are, that would be killer!

37. Brian F
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 10:26 am

    This has to be the worst idea I’ve ever seen. Having your every move on facebook automatically show up on someone’s (your distantly related friends) “news feed” every time they log in is creepy/weird and just horrendous.

    I seriously think facebook shot themselves in the foot with this one.

    All of the Web 2.0 analysts that think this is “cool” or that they’re bringing social networking to a new level doesn’t understand the site, clearly isn’t a college student, and obviously can’t comprehend what its like to be a college student in a day and age where there is little privacy left to begin with.

    Previously, if you cared about one of your hundreds of friends you’d visit their profile and interact.

    Now information is automatically displayed about exactly how many wall posts they made, when they made them, and what they said all in consolidated sparknote-esque form. This wasn’t really available previously unless you really were a stalker and took the hours to view the profiles of all of a certain person’s friends, looked through their walls, and noted down the times they posted and what they said.

    P.S. There are already tons of facebook groups with hundreds and hundreds of members dedicated to making it known that this feature sucks, and people are truly pissed off.

38. Michael Arrington
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    Just want to reiterate that the privacy setting on facebook apply to this data stream as well. The settings are up to the user.

39. susan a
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 10:54 am

    The complaints Yahoo360 and LinkedIN, etc, got died down quickly, if they had any at all. They’ve had the feature for months, and everyone seems pretty content.

    People like the feature it seems. I think there are even tools that let you do this on MySpace (3rd party scrapers that tell you when something is updated). Nice implementation of a ‘me-too’ feature.

    I hear video might be big someday too. Maybe Facebook can get ahead of the curve and create a site where people upload videos and…

40. Peter
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 10:56 am

    looking at these facebook snapshots i immediately (finally!) realized what those darned teenagers like so much about that darned myspace - it’s the essential creativity of the pages. look at the typical myspace page and it’s likely to look aesthetically horrible, but it will be *uniquely* ugly, at least. look at the profile page for a person on any other community website it’ll look uniquely utilitarian - square - conformist - adult - boring.

41. Daniel
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 10:57 am

    Somebody count the decrease in wall postings over the coming days?

42. Stephen Sclafani
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 10:59 am

    Anyone else find it humorous that half of the comments here are saying that Facebook is late to the game with these features and the other half are saying that they suck? Can’t win either way.

43. kosso
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:01 am

    Is that what they call a ‘FaceRiver’?

    I think so.

44. OrGoN3
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:05 am

    Facebook is good for 2 things: Stalking people and remembering your friends’ birthdays. This feature only makes it much more fun/easier for the creepy stalkers. Now they won’t have to continously browse pages, but can easily find what’s been updated. This is the worst feature ever implemented to facebook, and I am sure even more stalkers will now arise.

45. steve_ray
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:16 am

    Well, anyone saying that these features are late to the game don’t realize how entirely different they are from the supposed predecessors. Facebook has become the de facto standard for information about *people* in college (and, of course, working towards everyone). What makes this feature so compelling is that the first thing people do is go to facebook with things like relationship changes, events, etc. This makes ‘river’ actually have valuable and desirable (for close friends, at least) content.

    I’d say the only issue here is that it exposes to users how much facebook actually knows and keeps track of. Of course there’s going to be an initial shockwave from people - already groups like “WTF facebook” have sprung up - but overtime I would imagine it works out. Anyones guess. Notes certainly haven’t picked up from what I can tell. What this additionally shows us, though, is the gap between what technologists think consumers want (or are ready for) and what consumers want (*). Maybe if every college student had an RSS reader, this would be an easier step for them to take in. I was addicted right away. Most of the negativity probably just falls into the “people hate change” category… so let’s just wait and see.

    I do agree that there are a few privacy issues, and I think it was a bit shortsighted to not implement a disable feed feature to some degree. Other than that, I think it’s great.

46. jason
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:34 am

    As a college student, I can say everyone I have talked to about this seems to hate it. There is already a “Bring the Old Facebook back” group that is steadily gaining members. At least enable a feature to turn the feed off. I have no desire to see where one of my friends posted a comment. I get what you Andrew B is saying about FB being a place to connect with real people, but you have to keep in mind that many college kids just add people in order to have as many FB friends as possible. I know I have people I never talk to as friends and don’t feel like going through my friends list and deleting them. I like Facebook but do not want to dedicate that much time to it.

47. Freudian Slip
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:37 am

    “…where pages mostly just list off information about people, to a stream of fresh news and attention content about the user, HER friends and activities.”

    Who have you been stalking Michael?

48. carlo
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:44 am

    steve_ray, I still didn’t see you point about how these features on facebook are entirely different from the supposed predecessors. It sounds like what you are saying is that the feature itself is the same but the content is different on facebook. More tangential wouldn’t you say?

49. Zach
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:45 am

    I think it’s cool. The old home page was just wasted space anyway. And Facebooker’s always get upset when ANYTHING in the UI changes, so initial reaction is not really a good guage of whether it was in fact a good or bad change. I think it’ll grow on ‘em.

50. Otown
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:48 am

    The concept of an update feed from your friends and interests is not new, nor unlike anything else on the web. Match.com implemented it on their homepage. Also, photo sharing site Ringo.com uses it as the main premise of the site.

51. Jay
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:49 am

    Not to mention, what this feature ignores is that even people who don’t just “collect” Facebook friends generally have a gap between *friends* and *people they’re friendly with*. I have a group of guys from high school, for example; we hang out at parties, we’ll go out to a bar together, that sort of thing. But they certainly don’t need an up-to-the-minute newsfeed of the messages my girlfriend left for me on my wall. And my girlfriend certainly doesn’t need to know that some friend of mine, whom she dislikes, invited me to a party this weekend. Even though that information can all be removed from the newsfeed, that presumes that I’m sitting at my computer waiting to click that little ‘x’ immediately as things come in.

    At the end of the day, though I dislike this feature, I don’t flat-out *hate* it. But what makes it so inappropriate is, as others have said, the lack of a way to disable it. And it’s borderline offensive to get an email from Facebook telling me, in no uncertain terms, that “newsfeeds cannot be disabled”, and then go on to claim that “Facebook takes pride in giving its users complete control over their information”. Thanks, but no thanks.

52. Erik
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 11:57 am

    “I agree with Ruchi Sanghvi on the Facebook blog who says “These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web.”

    30boxes’ “Webtop” does this feature too as well as the ability to cull information from different sources like flickr, personal websites, etc.

53. Cody Simms
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:08 pm

    Upcoming.org’s right sidebar also does this quite nicely when you are signed in.

54. Ariel
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    I liked this when I misunderstood and thought they were releasing RSS feeds.

    Hopefully this will happen for the personal mini-feeds (w/privacy controls.) The netwide feeds would be a bit disturbing to find distributed outside defined SN.

    Although Facebooks API opening up implied ‘opening up’ I’m finding the details and subsequent strategies to be quite closed. IE, virtually everything facebook is locked into facebook unless their very stringent policies in the API persmissions are adheared to.

    They’re trying to build the control tower and disguising it as a SN with an open attitude.

55. steve_ray
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:12 pm

    I don’t think anyone is claiming that FB invented the river The idea is they have the RIGHT content to pull this off on a personal level. In some cases it doesn’t work or can have negative impact in your life (see jay’s comment), but for the most part it’s pretty engaging stuff. And I am in the “this will increase pageviews if it’s adopted” crowd. The River is all about getting you to click on new stuff that you wouldn’t have seen before.

56. Phil
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:15 pm

    Its funny that they think this addition will make people like it more. EVERYONE I KNOW likes it significantly less because of the changes. In fact, I would not be the least bit surprised if many people cut back on their useage of Facebook.

    Why change something thats doesnt need changing? Bad move Zuckerberg

57. Sharpshoot
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:26 pm

    The backlash is on http://www.TalkFace.com. Not a popular move with facebook users!

58. dep
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:28 pm

    School, work, death. I find it unfortunate that the site is chopped in to three categories. High school, College, and Work. What? Isn’t there one missing there? Social? Other?

59. Dannymo2
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:30 pm

    Anyone ready to kick out 2 billion?

60. Karel
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:37 pm

    Feed won’t become RSS available anytime soon. The company obviously would like to use this to encourage more frequent user visits, and to redirect those extra visits to other areas of the site, to increase overall stickyness.

    Also the feed as shown on the site is more rich than just a stream of content titles, including “types” and images.

    I’m an early facebook engineer insider.
    My book about Facebook and more on this topic are at http://www.fbbook.com.

61. Anthony
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:39 pm

    account deactivated

62. cg
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:47 pm

    Since I don’t have a Facebook account, I just wanted to let everyone know that I am now heading home for the day.

    I will be sure to keep you all up to date as to what I eat for dinner, when I fart, and what TV show I just watched.

    Thanks.

63. Karel
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    Some people are complaining about a “lack of privacy”, and what happens if friends can see too many of your changes. Remember, this lack of privacy was always there - perhaps only motivated friends saw this stuff before, but now every has a chance to glance at it to evaluate if it is interesting. And you don’t know that people more motivated to look at your profile and the people you’d like to be getting to know you better. Especially if you are a hot babe.

    Also some complain about the trivia and excessive detail this shows. People will learn to make fewer trivial, lame changes, which will be good for everyone. And Facebook is certainly already well along with figuring out what items to sort to the top. The point here is to show that the data is there!

64. bob
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 12:57 pm

    absolutely horrible, how the hell do we get rid of it??

65. David Askaripour
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    Jay, I feel the same way:

    “At the end of the day, though I dislike this feature, I don’t flat-out *hate* it. But what makes it so inappropriate is, as others have said, the lack of a way to disable it. And it’s borderline offensive to get an email from Facebook telling me, in no uncertain terms, that “newsfeeds cannot be disabled”, and then go on to claim that “Facebook takes pride in giving its users complete control over their information”. Thanks, but no thanks.”

    What the hell is facebook thinking by not allowing us to disable this feature. That’s insane!!!! Com’on Mark! Thought you were better than that, dude.

    Dave of Mind Petals

66. dave
    

    September 5th, 2006 at 1:05 pm

    http://www.facebook.com is crashing a lot right now. it’s hard to get onto the API developer discussion boards (where there has been some fiery discussion).
    discussion is continuing at htt