As Facebook continues to roll out the full version of its new user profiles, it’s becoming clear that their primary goal isn’t, as they said in May, to simply create a cleaner user experience and allow developers to have more meaningful engagement points with users. It’s more about highlighting new content relevant to the user and fostering conversations about that content. And the result is that the Facebook home page looks an awful lot like the exponentially smaller activity stream aggregation service called Friendfeed.
The new site will likely launch publicly on Monday. Until then, anyone can log in at www.new.facebook.com to see the new profile. The biggest visual change people will see on the home page - the combination of status updates, wall posts and news feed items into a single content stream. On the profile page status updates and other mini-feed items are also combined, and users are shown a big text box at the top encouraging them to update their status. For more details on the updates, see Inside Facebook and All Facebook.
This is just the beginning of the news for Facebook this week as they prepare for their second developer conference on Wednesday. The company is clearly looking to fine tune the Facebook experience to spur growth, particularly in the U.S. and other mature markets where they still trail MySpace.
Many of the changes seem designed to put the year-old application platform on the backburner more than anything. Facebook has had to fight an ongoing privacy, spam and competitive battle with its more aggressive third party developers, using algorithmic and policy tools.
But it’s also clear that they like what they see at Friendfeed, which expertly combined the idea of an activity stream that was first popularized by Facebook with the microblogging trend introduced by Twitter. Users constantly add content that their friends read and comment on, which creates yet new content. The virtuous page-view creating cycle continues.
Facebook still silos most of this information, although they are more than happy to have users bring in third party data to the Facebook feed. This week facebook will also launch their Facebook Connect product, which is designed to let users get that data back out of Facebook.
I think it is inappropriate to claim Facebook is being “FriendFeedized” when FriendFeed’s entire business is a direct rip of Facebook’s News Feed concept. Those guys should really expect nothing less than seeing all of their innovations integrated into Facebook. As long as Facebook continues to innovate in the newsfeed segment, Friend Feed will remain a marginal player for nerds.
I agree, there is really no use for common ppl other than few nerds. But it will take little long for common ppl to realize uselessness of a website.
You are totally right. FB has been a huge innovator and there are a ton of other sites, including FF and Twitter that are trying to build an entire business by copying one feature of FB, but that’s just not going to be enough in the long haul even if they add a couple of their own innovations on top.
Really have to admire their tenacious tweaking and innovation.
It is nothing less than a brilliant competitive survival strategy.
Cant wait to read Mark’s memoirs when they come out.
Before their reincarnation - there were hardly any blog posts about them - it was all about MySpace
I agree, it’s a nice move by Facebook as they know that users want to know what’s going on (who’s doing what, with who and when). It’s a lot more easier for them to go the FriendFeed way, than for FF or Twitter to go the Facebook way.
I was reading about Personal Knowledge Base as a way that users can/could store all their info (from RSS to Twitter to FF to IMs) all in a central location, and be able to index it and do all sorts of thing with it.
I believe the Facebook changes are beneficial in that there is more white space, and more clarity to encourage action through sharing new content. While, so far, the ability to add comments to Facebook activity isn’t seeing a lot of action, as far as I can tell, to encourage discussion with friends outside of the wall is a good move.
Facebook has a huge user base, so them adopting this model is a much bigger step forward than the many other smaller services who have done so, but FriendFeed is far from alone at this point in encouraging sharing and discussion.
Maybe I’ll start posting more data to Facebook’s news feed and see if my family will respond the way peers on FriendFeed do today. My guess is some will remain hesitant.
Louis, very true, it is the best thing Facebook could come up with - we all have the apps and content aggregated to our profiles with people rarely ever noticing them, let alone commenting on them. Hopefully this will change the situation and we’ll see discussions finally on Facebook instead of constant pokes.
Ugh, what a horrible redesign.
Fixed width pages are always bad. This one goes beyond that–the right hand column actually gets permanently chopped when I load the page, so I can’t even scroll sideways to read it. They must have worked quite hard to get that bad a misfeature on the web.
I guess at some point, startups become too big to stay creative and start following others…
It’s nice that Facebook has gotten a lot of tweaking done to the platform and have managed to get some semblance of control over the apps that have been running rampant over the past year or two.
Unfortunately, I really cannot stand the new design that much. There are aspects that are nice, but overall, I just kind of wonder what they were thinking, or why they didn’t really look into feedback from other designers or something. Yes, yes, looking like Friendfeed is nice and whatever, but they just destroyed the original look of Facebook to accomplish it.
The initial screenshots of the profile changes they made were great. Clean, new tabs, little bit more Ajax, very functional, looked great and still allowed the occasional app to show up if a user really liked it.
Now, there’s no container lines, there’s this damn edit button that pops up all over the place on the profile, and apps have pretty much been obliterated (okay, so that might not be the worst thing, but there are decent apps out there I might want people to see). In short, it feels like this design went off half-cocked and FB is going to be hearing about it for weeks form their users.
Okay, I’m done ranting.
Above rant aside, the news page doesn’t look too bad. I was mainly referring to the new profiles. Though I won’t mind seeing a couple of containing lines on the left and or right to keep the eyes from wandering into nothingness.
You can see the future by going to even newer version:
http://new.new.new.new.facebook.com/
Coming from the other side, I’d like to see the Facebookization of Friendfeed (without sucking that is). FF is a great place for content and discussion, but not so much for community and social networking.
FB should focus more on how it encourages users to group contacts and communicate in different ways to each group.
I don’t use Twitter to update Facebook status anymore because what I want to communicate to my Twitter followers is usually work-related. FB is just a mush of loads of people I’ve ever met - there’s not a lot I want to say to ALL of them.
Commenting on stories is direct borrowing from friendfeed, but we cant accuse the original creaters of “news-feed and mini-feeds” , and that was announced last month.
Rather than this, i would call giving too much importance to those comments is friendfeedization. I see “comment” “comment” everywhere hurting my eyes, and there is no hide option for that “comment” link, which is really bad.
How is commenting on stories borrowing from FriendFeed? We’ve been able to comment on peoples uploaded pictures and shared links on Facebook for years.
Hi, I am from India. As for as India is considered, it will be difficult for the Facebook to compete with orkut in the Social networking space.
This is a good move! Honestly, looking at their social networking rivals Twitter & FriendFeed’s growing popularity, which is an indication of where social networking is headed(more & more towards a off-line networking style i.e you listen a lot, mostly to people conversing about interesting/current stuff and when they/you get a chance you chime in with your views/say hi) Facebook has done the right thing.
We are in for some “throw a sheep/played Dr/Fought Crime with you” tweets
new.facebook.com redirects to facebook.com for me
It’s http://www.new.facebook.com - funnily enough, it makes a difference.
I just wrote up a review on the news feed page. I’m not impressed; I feel like they changed that component because they felt they needed to do *something* to it with the massive changes they were making on the profile side. And all they did was gut the left sidebar and throw off the balance:
http://www.htmlist.com/design/.....news-feed/
I’ve made this hypothesis few months ago: Facebook should start managing the activity stream of each member of the social graph in a more effective way, and putting some FriendFeed inside Facebook is a good idea. Starting from today the service will focus itself on that purpose.
THIS IS REALLY GOOD!!
its nice to have new features on facebook
Someone has already pointed out that it is absurd to say Facebook is copying FriendFeed when FriendFeed was a knock off of Facebook’s News Feed service.
Saying that just makes it sound like you’ve never used Facebook. The home page seems to have had no changes besides moving stuff around so I’d be super-interested in where the “FriendFeedization” comment comes in.
agree with earlier commenters & Dare… Facebook pioneered this approach first (or perhaps you could say LiveJournal did even earlier).
kudos to FriendFeed as i think they’ve expanded on the approach, however while i agree Facebook is watching & integrating FF features, it’s perhaps a stretch to suggest Facebook is copying FriendFeed exclusively… more like they’re both watching each other & innovating.
still, it is interesting to see what happens to FriendFeed. i’d be surprised if someone like Google or Microsoft didn’t decide to pick them up as a competitive alternative to Facebook. my bet is the GOOG pulls the trigger on buying FF before too long. over/under at 9 months, or before their next financing round
FriendFeed wasn’t the first to come up with the idea. I could point out lots of other places it popped up in first.
Awesome, continued unneeded whoring of FF, congrats.
Suck in FriendFeed, you missed the boat by relying on the A-list bloggers and not real people. You are TOAST.
i have friendfeed in FB, and there IS some repetition of my activities reported in both FF and Newsfeed.
Ads now are more prominent on every page, other than the homepage of facebook.
But I like the overall ui. Concept of boxes is good, atleast that reduces the size of profile page which loads initially. It was a pain for a low b/w user like me to go to someones profile who has 100s of apps added
Still NOT working for latin american networks? : ( : (
Looks like they are just trying to make it into twitter with a few extra tabs. The apps are basically so hidden now that no one will care about them anymore, so the service now resembles essentially a twitter + photos, and I can’t seem to find the GROUPS anywhere in the new interface.
I haven’t seen the new look yet, but judging from what I’ve heard and read, it’s basically a rearrangement, not a new design, meant to clean up where some people have overloaded on the apps. Analogy-wise, I would say it’s like taking a desk (essentially a table with no drawers) that is scattered with papers and replacing it with a desk that has drawers and shelves. It’s meant to reorganize and clean up.
Then again, I cannot say this for sure, as I’ve not seen the new look myself yet.
The lack of groups is really frustrating. I was hoping the re-design would increase their usability and visibility. Instead they’ve focused on worthless apps, and overlooked one of the major areas of potential for professional value.
A sign of the accelerating shift from the walled garden model to the era of the Social Web, in which the field of competition shifts to who can provide the best utility for interacting with an ever-expanding universe of social sites. The three key components: identity, social graph, and aggregation.
i’d add one more thing - authentication. i agree fb cant compete with a social internet. i’d go one step further and say that if fb dont focus their strategy soon and stop being all things - fb fatigue will accelerate.
zuck - we know you’re “philosophically aligned” to opening up - so do it.
Hope the new design gives user a very friendly experience and allow developers to have more meaningful engagement points with users as promised by facebook.
Am I the only person who thinks of cannibalism whenever they hear “FriendFeed?”
lol. I think you’ve now burned a new image into my mind.
People have really jumped on the micro-blogging bandwaggon. What is it about micro-blogging that makes people so obsessed? It is a thing of utilitarian value or merely just an exciting fad?
Mike
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
I like the new look but I think the changes are going to go over the heads of average users. They probably won’t even notice that it’s different.
But Facebook is just so boring.
i’ll drink to that
FACEFEED YOU SUCK!, Social networks are silos of yuck!
Zuckerberg be off with your sandals and get out the way for internet innovation. Open is the answer your network like all the other SNS are holding your users hostage to your bland and controlling designs, and have to copy to stay alive. You don’t even do flash, enough already.
Note: This was obviously written in the style of a aggrieved Techcrunch reader. Disclosure I have nothing to do with anything except what I am doing, and for that you can currently see that on Friendfeed!!
Will Facefeed allow all these distribution and connection platforms in? import flash etc. Or just try and keep the lid on internet discovery and innovation in their own little silo of blandness and restriction?
I currently have my FriendFeed RSS being imported into Facebook. Does that mean the world will now explode?
FF has so many more import options, not to mention unlimited number of feed imports. Facebook just has one!
For app developers who use ad revenue it sucks. Now there’s an ad bar on the right side of any app. I think this is going to negatively impact ad revenue for certain kinds of apps.
It keeps on getting bigger and bigger…
Facefeed sucks! Zuckerberg be off with ya sandals!
Let the air of the network in, instead of trying to hold hostage on to your users in the hope of selling them ads which they will ignore anyway.
Disclosure : I have nowt to do with these SNS silos of yuck!!
I’m all for freedom to the smart network, people will make their own spaces and places in their own time, will take their friends and ID where and when they like, Open ID is a start. Let the evolution happen!!
I am loving it!! I really like the new design…!
It seems to me as though myspace and facebook have switched.
Myspace has been cleaning up their design while facebook has been doing the opposite.
The new experience is anything but cleaner. It’s compartmentalized and has seems more like a database interface than a user interface.
The whole obsession with tabs from Windows Vista to websites is really obnoxious. It makes information MORE difficult to access. This upgrade might be great for those who add every stupid application they find, but it’s a nightmare for someone who runs a clean page and likes to have all of their information in one, streamlined place without having to click through 100 small offshoots to find the relevant data.
Sadly it looks like with all of their focus on increasing interaction and data exchange they completely overlooked groups and the need to make them more interconnected/easier to check, view and participate in.
girls, why you removed my post?
actually, my comment.
FriendFeed will never hit the “mainstream” demographic.
On quick glance, seems like the right gutter has been combined with the left to yield an opportunity for a 300×250 above-the-fold standard ad spot, which Facebook had sorely been missing. Smart move, and the fact that the redesign captures so many other needed tweaks will keep user discontent on that point to a minimum.
I think that they have borrowed more from Tumblr than friendfeed. But the result looks very good. I bet that linked in does something very similar in the next 6 months - this pattern of information sharing/comment works equally well in the professional - more topical world.
Do you think facebook might be repositioning itself to more directly take on Twitter in functionality later this week?
@tsmit: hm… that’s an interesting idea. not sure FB will ever overtly compete with Twitter, though it’s clear that many different networks are beginning to converge… I’ll often update my FB status via the twitterific app on my phone, which sends the update to Twitter, my personal blog, and FB. On top of that I often update my FB status/GChat status separately and more frequently, with a different tone of content… I tend to think of my Twitter updates as “interesting thoughts on-the-go” while my status updates are more mundane… but that’s just me…
I will say that FB’s new mobile app for the iPhone is great to use, and makes it a lot easier to do mobile status updates and photo uploads on the go… If they pulled out status functionality and created a plugin I could add to my personal blog, it might stand to directly compete with Twitter. But given Twitter’s lack of a profit-generating business model, I’m not sure FB would launch into such a venture just yet.
Who cares who copied what and from whom. As long as the web`s taking good turns like this one, I`m happy.
I really like the new design and I just love friendfeed.
But the idea of combining wall and feed stories was proposed long back by facebook, maybe even before the launch of friendfeed.