Facebook has invited a group of bloggers and journalists to its offices on Hamilton Street in Palo Alto today to discuss the details of its upcoming profile redesign, which we’re told will launch in a few weeks.
Keep checking in here as I share my notes from the event.
Elliot Schrage has kicked things off by saying today will be more focused on Q&A than the last event, which was about Facebook Chat.
Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Product Marketing, is discussing the vision behind the profile redesign, and the mini-feed/news feed in particular.
Goals for new design:
- For users: Make profiles cleaner and simpler, give users more control over their profiles, and emphasize recent and relevant information
- For developers: Create more meaningful engagement with users, offer new integration points in profiles, and provide distribution for engaging applications
Going to give developers a beta period to step into sandbox and play with new design, so they’re ready when profile gets rolled out in coming weeks.
New design takes advantage of tabs; goal to split up different types of information, make it simpler to navigate.
The basics: feed, info, photos, boxes, and custom application tabs.
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Feed Tab
Heart of the new profile. Continuous stream of all different types of information. Includes wall posts. With publisher tool, both owners and viewers can create content on the profile. With story re-sizing feature, users can choose from 3 different sized stories.’
Info Tab
Contains contents of original core Facebook profile. Reason for splitting the feed and info tabs: feed content changes often, info content tends to be more static.
Want to make the info tab extensible for third party developers (no details yet what that will entail).
Photos Tab
14 million photos uploaded daily, 6 billion total - a very popular application across Facebook, hence its own tab.
Photos is just one example of many apps that can blow up and get their own tabs.
Boxes Tab
Place for application boxes, as you see mixed in with information and feed on current profile. All current boxes on profile will be completely preserved. Users will still have control over moving boxes around, resizing them, etc. “A lot of value here” to putting boxes on own page.
Custom Application Tab
Users can create individual tabs for each application, to showcase their favorites. You can control where the tabs show up.
Now turning to how applications will plug into new profile…
New design will allow for more engaging apps, developers to reach users in more meaningful ways.
Main integration points:
Feed Tab
Applications can publish directly into users’ feeds. With publisher, applications can integrate directly into the profile. With story re-sizing, developers can offer 3 different sized stories for users to choose from: full, medium, and one line.
Info Tab
Applications can add text and images on the info tab page to provide more information about a user. List top friends, top music choices, etc. “New ways for users to represent themselves”. Travel, sports, entertainment are all possible areas to do this.
Boxes Tab
As said before, all boxes moved over here. Two types of boxes: wide and narrow
Custom Application Tab
Similar to application canvas pages, promote application visibility. “Should drive extra app traffic”
Handing it over to Q&A now…
Facebook hasn’t decided yet whether the Wall will be completely integrated into the Feed tab. They may leave it as its own tab, or they might integrate it fully and then allow users to filter by just wall posts vs. other mini-feed-like updates. Still working with users about this.
Plan for June launch, “few weeks”
We’ve been putting more Ajax on the site over the last 7-8 months, which should show that Facebook focuses on engagement, not page views. Says profile design is meant for more engagement, not increasing page views.
Expect to see static apps not be as successful as they were in the past — new design benefits dynamic ones the most. While boxes stored away on a separate tab, they can also be given their own tab and integrated into the publisher tool, which shows up on the feeds tab.
Facebook plans to walk users through process of switching over to new profile.
The ability to import data from other sites will be maintained with new profile. The publisher tool have this ability as well.
“We’re trying to build these pipes that carry information” (sounds like the internet to me).
Facebook still plans to have a column that displays application boxes regardless of whether they’re on the info or feed tabs. These boxes, however, will have height restrictions.
Everything is still in flux with regards to the new design, so this column layout with its templated areas could change.
The new profile will be a bit bigger, coming in at 760 pixels wide. It will also be debuted with a new general site design that lacks the left-hand column and puts most options in a top bar with dropdown menus. See a screenshot and details of the design at Inside Facebook.
“Feed Tab - heart of the new profile”
“heart” - eh?
- FriendFeed meet your match?
How about Facebook buys Twitter, makes it stable, and places it exactly as it is within my Facebook profile. Then it becomes much more of a news and information source and stream. It’s interesting that everyone in my Facebook network update stream says “Twittering:” (unless Twitter is down again). Never, when I go to Twitter, do I see a Tweet that begins with “Facebooking:” (or on Facebook, blah blah).
Twitter = what’s happening
Facebook = what happened (with lots of previous life, work, school stuff)
Overall, this is a good move. Minor issue is that this doesn’t give developers and platforms who want to maintain good UX on Facebook a lot of time to react to the new design.
Boxes tab - seems like a random name/title for the place where apps live.
@JeffC - that would be a great move by fb - lots of social relevance moving to twitter - plus fb scales at the very least twitter would work if fb snapped it up.
has fb bought anything yet?
This sounds like a good design. I think it may address concerns of users who think their facebook profile is too cluttered.
I have been following the new profile design for quite some time. It looks fantastic.
I can’t tell, but does the new design aim to push out screen width? It still looks like the same framework to me.
seems like app developers are not going to like this new design….ppl will soon forget apps on the pages if it is pushed to separate tab…most of the time i install app becz i see right on the first page when i visit friends pages…if i do not see it on front page, i never bother to click on apps tab to find out what apps my friends installed
Amazon gets rid of tabs, FB brings them back. I think there are no UI studies that are definitive.
Timline of Facebook Profiles:
Simple -> Bloat -> Simple (now) -> _____
You fill in the blank.
It will be interesting to see how it all acts when it is live. Again the developers “get” to go rework their code. ugghhh. But there could be some very positive upside to these changes for better applications.
I strongly suspect that the motivation behind the new top tabbed navigation is to create additional advertising real estates on the left side. I have a few screen shots and much additional thoughts here.
http://facereviews.com/2008/05.....ing-closer
Rodney Rumford
Wonder why it’s being designed for an 800×600 res? I wonder how many FB users are still running that?
It will be interesting to see how using more Ajax will work bearing in mind the issues regarding accessibility. (http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/stop-using-ajax/) Especially bearing in mind the implication that this will be “real” Ajax from the comment about page views.
I’m pretty sure that as Facebook becomes more and more of a service provider, they are more and more obliged to provide an equivalent service for all users, regardless of (dis)ability. Certainly under UK law.
So now FB is running Campfire One-style events around UI layout changes? What’s next, Google calling in the heads of the blogger world to “launch” a new tab panel design for iGoogle?
BREAKING NEWS: Google changed colors of Search button to slightly darker gray today.
A total, company wide, redesign of all Y! properties into something simple and less cluttered, and more integrated, might be newsworthy, but this?
@stv I agree. I don’t care much about apps in the first place and the ones I do care about are my own. The likelihood that I will click the “apps tab” to see and interact with apps on a friends page will be very low. Not a smart move. If they want to solve the “too much stuff on one page” problem perhaps they should allow generic pages in which users can create tabs if they want to and add/move content around to personalize and organize. (sort of like tabs on iGoogle)
I don’t think that the introduction of Tabs is a good idea. Who will care to visit the other pages/tabs?
it’s not the profile view they need to overhaul, it’s your home page/mini-feed view that is in drastic need of some updated logic. that’s pretty much everyone’s first view and every month i become less and less active because of all the crap i see in there.
the trial they did with thumbs up and thumbs down held some promise for me, but delivered nothing. adjusting my mixer desk thingy did very little.
i don’t care that someone sent something a stupid gift, or a mega-ultra-crap-sheep poke. i keep missing good friends’ status updates and wall postings and picture uploads because the signal to noise ratio just keeps getting worse and worse.
Well, its cool they realised in time that social networking is like fashion. Sooner or later, people will get tired of one layout and probably jump off to the next hottest social networking site out there.
Good move– too many people seem to have “neverending profiles.”
Does any one know if Facebook outsource its web development work or does it do it in the US ?
http://www.mscsector.com
If the info tab is available to developers how is that any different to now? Plus the boxes tab will still get all the traffic from people looking at the SuperFunFunnyWall (or whatever) so it will still see a fair chunk of activity.
Judging by the earlier post on TC devs will still have access to the news feed, just that it won’t be the default setting. All ingenious app developers need to do is work out a way to make people want to turn that feature on by building an app which is - gasp - actually useful!
The new design of facebook is very bad!