Facebook has just posted a lengthy letter to its users on its official blog detailing some of the changes we’ll soon be seeing on the site’s recently-redesigned homepage.
Included among the new features are live updating to the homepage stream, which will make the homepage truly real-time (previously it would show up-to-the-minute results, but only when you refreshed the page). The feed will also begin to include photos tagged from your friends to the feed – something that I’m very surprised wasn’t included when the new homepage debuted (photos are often the first thing I check when I log into the site). Users will also have more control over what items from third party applications will appear into the stream (apparently users have been complaining that these have had too strong a presence in the current version).
In a move that may be meant to appease some of the many users calling for the ‘Old Facebook’, the blog post also notes that the home page’s Highlights section will attempt to “mirror more closely the content that the earlier News Feed provided”. In my experience the current version of Highlights has been pretty underwhelming, but I don’t think that’s because it’s presenting news I’m uninterested in. Rather, I find the Highlights section to be too small to display many meaningful stories, and I feel like I’ve trained myself to look at the center of the page, so I often forget to look at Highlights entirely.
These changes (especially the new Highlights) are clearly at least partially in response to very vocal base of users who hate the redesign, but Facebook isn’t going to be reverting back to the old News Feed any time soon. And really, it shouldn’t. As Robert Scoble pointed out, customer requests can easily lead the businesses they’re complaining to astray.
About time Facebook listened to its users!
says the guy who doesn’t realize facebook recreated its old ‘wall’ functionality
Facebook doesn’t have to “listen” to its users – they run their business, so they alter their site as they see fit.
I’m still in the camp of those who think the redesign is okay. People should take a look at what the new interface has to offer before whining (most of my friends whined right away, without any thought), and maybe they’d appreciate the benefits. Also, I’m all for democracy, but the anti-redesign groups and polls will not necessarily always influence the repeal of a business decision.
I agree and do like the new design quite a bit better. With 175M users how much of a fraction of a % of unhappy users does it take to create some negative noise?
Keep in mind, when you out right ignore your users and run your business how you see fit … that will lead to you running your business right into the ground.
Listening to your community is critical to keeping users around. But at the same time, you don’t need to kiss their feet or do everything they ask.
Think about it, lets say Twitter for some odd reason decided it would be a good idea to move the status text box to the bottom of the page. People would be furious and demand it to be fixed. This would be obviously a time to listen to your community or they would bail over night.
BUT, I do hate those people who start petitions to revert back to an older interface because they are used to it.
I think its a very delicate balance of what the business requirements are and how your users will enjoy the redesign or feature changes.
About 1% of Facebook users joined the main group saying they hated the new design. Any company that makes big changes to its customer offering based on 1% of users objecting is going to be forever chasing its tail.
By contrast, many more than 1% of Twitter users have been frustrated by how hard it is to use effectively for some time, but it is only really slowly that they have addressed some of these issues by doing things like finally adding search to the main site. Even then they only do stuff once they’ve tested it out with a sample.
Twitter makes the guys at Facebook look like they are running after any instruction they hear without remembering what they were already doing and why.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http;//www.wecando.biz
What are the benefits? I dont want to see 12 separate posts because a freinds sent 12 different people a “gift”
The new Facebook is dead. Long live the new Facebook.
Agreed, they have to move on and accept the new facebook.
TechFilipino
All they need to do is give us users a choice. Put up new sites for testing but let the user switch back and keep what they have. They can then add new widgets and over time assimilate into the new site format.
Paul Lopez
I think that’s easier said than done, especially with 175 million users.
Google does it.
oh so then it must be real easy
how silly we were to think otherwise!
Google allows you to shift around widgets on your google homepage. I think you’ll agree that a facebook profile page is a lot more different.
Basically, it’s NOT that easy.
So then every time they want to add a feature, they would have to add it to two divergent systems? They’d need to double their development staff.
It’s all going to depend on how much better the main stream gets – it’s just too damn fast/busy now.
Example – I had been posting updates to family and friends via facebook lately, since it saved me time calling/emailing around for significant, but not “long distance” worthy events. Yesterday, my dog passed away, and I posted a status update and a photo gallery to help send her off… And no one saw it. I’m still finding friends and a few relatives who have no idea what happened, which absolutely wouldn’t have happened with the “old Facebook”.
I’m all for change, but changing everything into a bad version of twitter… Well, not my thing. The new redesign would’ve been a much better thing to try if, for example, growth slowed down a lot, or Twitter grew a whole bunch. Preemptively taking action, in such a damaging and user-affecting way, well that just caused what we saw – massive rejection and upset.
Hopefully Suckerberg will learn his lesson, and respect (if not always slavishly obey) his customers.
Sorry for your loss.
But if companies made decision AFTER major paradigm shifts, they’d be up shit creek without a paddle.
Facebook has the right idea. Innovate ASAP and don’t let someone else blindside you.
what i really miss is the live feed.
now i’m missing lots of comments.
Let me customize my News Feed already. I don’t care about my friends taking quizzes or their favorite tween handbag.
You can, it’s called filters.
It’s called filter out all your friends until there’s nothing left.
Maybe, in some cases, that would even be a good thing to do.
But, the main gripe is, that’s not HOW it was filtered previously… And the previous content-type based filtering has been completely AWOL so far. That’s about 90% of the complaining I see.
Bingo, it’s not the redeisgn so much as the lost functionality/options. I want to see my friends’ pictures, events, etc. but not the quizzes and silly stuff. Right now I have 13 consecutive items in my feed of a friend who took a quiz. EPIC FAIL
The filter problem, as I see it, is that Facebook may in fact WANT to fill a feed with the useless quizzes and silly stuff, because clicking on those links takes you to apps who’s creators make money off the ads on the page. I have no interest in seeing that stuff, but if I’m allowed to block it, then Facebook loses just a little bit of the little bit of revenue they do make. We’re so trained to ignore ads that there’s probably a team at Facebook pulling their hair out, wondering, “WTF do we have to do to make money here?”
Absolutely. I don’t want to know every little gift my friends give another or what quizzes they take or if they sneezed today!!!! I TRULY (Dave) preferred the old format. I miss lots of status updates because of the speed of the feed. Some people actually have gainful employment and can’t facebook every minute!
“Truely” – wtf? How are we supposed to value your opinions if you can’t even spell?
I cannot help but notice how many people are leaving Facebook. I think their inclusion of the “what are you thinking about” feature will only help people understand the value of twitter.
My apologies for having to make one more mention on twitter on TC.
people will eat what they’re fed, would you like some ketchup with that Zuckerturd
xDDDD
LMFAO
I’m too DIY to complain. I too was underwhelmed by the Highlights pane, so I whipped up a Stylish script and *POOF*, no more visual clutter.
@matt I like your site, Facebook should learn from its simplicity )
I am happy with the new facebook, except one silly simple thing: put the pokes back at the top! Yeah, I still poke people, and they poke me back; it’s an on going never ending thing.
It is simple really: the “new fb” is too busy.
Though I’m always up for new things, I’ve realized over the last few days that my own usage has decreased *drastically* because I’m bombarded by too much s**t that I simply don’t care about. I’m all for pushing the envelop – but I’m much more for simple interfaces (a la Google – or old(er) facebook iterations).
totally agree with Nick_Man, this was the best thing that could have happened to Twitter.
I don’t trust Facebook anymore.
My guess is Facebook noticed a real drop in return visit frequency after the redesign. Otherwise, there is no reasonable way to explain this about-face.
when all this designed build “by committee”keep going FB,I don`t mind with your new look,I don`t mind with FB dictator as long I can expect surprise for the decission
I would hope they heard the complaints and then looked at interaction data. I imagine they saw a drop-off in page views and other activity.
Like others have said, I’ve noticed my own drop-off in use of the site since the redesign. Maybe over time I’ll like the chunkier news feed items, but what I won’t ever like is knowing that I’m missing out on items that I used to catch in the past.
The mobile feed has remained true to its old form, which more closely matches the last incarnation of the feed. I’ve been using my phone more to read my feed.
Tangent: Speaking of mobile, I remember the days when I could post a comment to TC on my Javascript-less phone. Oh, the memories…
The real-time status feed was announced in FB’s original press release for the redesign. Why they launched the redesign without it last week, why they announce today that they’re going to be rolling it out without mentioning that they’d always intended to build it, and why this article fails to notice either of these facts, is a mystery to me.
A “real-time” status feed and “auto-updating” are two different things. Live updating is already there – when you refresh, you’ll see things that have happened in the last minute, unlike the pre-redesign FBook. In this letter, they announced “auto-updating”, which I presume means something more like making new updates automatically appear without the need to refresh your browser.
I’m simply using the normal definition of “real-time” (as in, the same time as the real world). Your distinction is, I humbly suggest, perhaps a rationalization for FB’s doublespeak.
It’s pretty clear that FB launched the new home page a little prematurely, without all their intended features. The announcement today is not, IMHO, that they are adding the “real-time” or “auto-updating” feature, but that they are rather going to be “adding the ability to turn on auto updating”. They’re going to turn it on. They’re acknowledging that the feature is already pretty much there.
Smells like they simply killed the real-time feature at the last minute because it wasn’t ready for prime time yet.
“Real-time” is vague and could potentially mean many, many things. What it meant here was that Facebook, like Twitter, displays actions/events in the mini-feed as soon as they happen (at least when you refreshed the page). This is radically different than Facebook a month ago, where it might take 45 minutes for an action/event to appear, no matter how frequently you refreshed. This is a radical change that, if Twitter’s history is an indication, introduces significant technical hurdles – are you suggesting that this change and the announcement of the “real-time” feed came at the same time by coincidence?
I think you are thinking of an engineer’s definition of “real time”. The phrase is not vague at all, at least not to normal people. I was simply using the definition that normal people use.
My suggestion is merely that the auto-updating feature was always supposed to be part of the “real time” feature. Which is hairsplittingly close to your own theory.
Actually, Facebook HAD an auto-updating view — the old “live feed” tab on the homepage would update itself without the user needing to refresh the homepage. So this might be an instance where Facebook has the feature ready to roll because they’ve done it before. (I used to leave it open in a spare Firefox tab and let it run while I was working.)
Which highlights the most confusing and annoying part of the Facebook revamp: Users aren’t just upset about layout changes, they’re upset about features they used actually disappearing. Why Zuckerberg thought a less-featured site would be more popular is something of a mystery.
Jason, are you sure that this is “relenting”? Isn’t it possible that Facebook planned to slowly reintroduce old features after a major technical overhaul because incremental change is a good engineering practice?
This was exactly my point above. I agree — it’s not relenting or even being sensitive to user needs when you re-announce the delivery of a feature you already announced you were going to deliver.
Yeah that’s possible, but as Mike noted in his followup article, Facebook’s blog post is called “Responding to Your Feedback”, which seems to indicate that at least some of this stuff was done in response to what users were asking for.
As far as the auto-updating goes, I’m not so sure Facebook had the feature in the works already (I’m sure they had thought about it, but they may have felt it wasn’t really needed). Twitter doesn’t have auto-updating, and it’s clear Facebook was drawing inspiration from them.
My hunch is that “Responding To Your Feedback” was an overly-friendly way of saying “We were already working on it, you ungrateful brats”
. I say this because I don’t see any reason – other than technical hurdles and manpower limitations – for Facebook to remove filtering options (like apps) or content streams (like photo tagging).
Again, my hunch is that old features are being re-rolled out slowly for technical reasons. As our familiarity with the Twitter fail-whale has shown, a real time public messaging system is more complex than it sounds and introduces a much higher system load than a fairly static page. Consider how primitive (non-existent?) Twitter’s filtering options are even now. Features that might have been simple might introduce a lot of complexity and/or system load in a real-time system. Facebook took a few steps back to make the giant leap forward into a public messaging service.
Some people mention they arebeing annoyed by the quiz and application updates. I have written a guide on how to remove that information, check out http://fredrikk...k-stream-guide/
-Fredrik
The new design is too noisy. The great thing about the old design was that you got a sampling of what was going on, not the entire flood. With the new design I find that friends who are heavy twitterers dominate the feed with messages auto-repeated from twitter and the less-frequent posters, who tend to provide the more interesting content, get lost in the noise.
I don’t want Facebook to be more like twitter and I especially don’t want it to *be* twitter (I already use a twitter client, thank you). I want to be like Facebook. That’s why I use different sites. To me it seems the real caving on Facebook’s part is to submit to the fear of needing to be like Twitter, rather than sticking with its individuality.
Doug, I 100% agree with your points, in particular: “To me it seems the real caving on Facebook’s part is to submit to the fear of needing to be like Twitter, rather than sticking with its individuality.” You hit the nail on the head.
FB better listen to their users or they will fail to another player that does. It’s just a matter of which users they listen to. IMO, if FB becomes more like Twitter, it opens the door for new or existing players to snatch up users who aren’t enamored with Twitter (and there are plenty). Keep an eye on that FB growth curve!
Change will and must happen, yes. But, at the same time, don’t knock consistency and it’s power to influence user behavior. Google is the perfect example of that strength. Sometimes the “change” everyone talks about so much can be a migration to a different service.
I think there should be a balance b/w what a user wants and what a user “needs” (as decided by the company)
I find it odd that they don’t mention one of the most ‘whined’ about lost features. “Who’s friending Who”
Adding back in the Photos Tagged aspect made me scratch my head even more as to why they would think ppl wouldn’t want this kind of info.
More highlights?! Ugh…I hate that section the most!
I’d also like to be able to just delete something from my home page feed vs. having to permanently hide a friend and all their updates.
“Adding back in the Photos Tagged aspect made me scratch my head even more as to why they would think ppl wouldn’t want this kind of info.”
I can’t imagine how adding “more” clutter to the news feed would be an “improvement.” Particularly when photos are currently displaying in such a cocked-up manner.
Anecdotaly, a friend edited 17 photos that she had posted months ago. EACH PHOTO re-published to the newsfeed, in batches of three large thumbnails.
Each post was over an inch deep. Additionally three people had commented on the album. With each three-picture post, the three comments also published. My *entire* news feed was taken up by this friend’s 6-month old photos…. How is this useful?
the number of users a site has is irrelevant. it’s still just a bloody website built with java, html, css and other code. the new design is a balls up from top to bottom. it’s cluttered, confusing, dysfunctional and the rounded corners on everything is a nightmare.
twitter needs to hire a “designer” who knows what the f*ck he/she is doing. Douglas Bowman is free I believe!
I also don’t understand the idea behind the ‘recent activity’ modules on our walls. Sometimes it’ll pop up to the top of the page when there’s something new….sometimes the new entry gets added…but the ‘recent activity’ module stays below newer entries.
And what was the thought behind dropping the time and date of these things!?
Also really miss being able to decide if something should be “small, short or full” on my wall.
I keep finding less options and less flexibility.
It also seems that FB is moving away from a place to connect with friends. Not only do you no longer find out who friended who…but they push the “People You May Know’ to the bottom right…under the Highlights. Which means you have to scroll pretty far down to even see them?!
A lot of it just makes no sense to the regular user (and I have to wonder if the Arringtons and Scobles of the world are actual everyday users and not looking at this from the outside in)
If you filter out the noise of “WAH, I DON’T LIKE IT, GO BACK!” — which are the people you suggest “lead the businesses they’re complaining to astray” — there are valid complaints/suggestions on ways to IMPROVE the steps Facebook has taken to “move forward.” And there are simply some things about the old interface that worked well and were inexplicably removed.
Breaking new ground is fine and well, but when did usability testing/feedback go out of vogue?
at last a great idea for us!!!
Photo tagging (and all other things mentioned) are a nice step but we still need more info that were available before: New friendships (the best way to find new friends joining), photo comments (it is also important to see all comments in the stream), group & Page joining, event participation, application installs. The Highlights section is OK but it is also important to have the above in the stream. Especially new friendships and photo comments!
I’m sorry, but it really should.
It’s not the new design aspects that are the problem, it’s the lack of control on what you see in your feed that is the major issue. If we don’t want to see quizzes from everybody for example but still want to see everything else from that person we should be able to turn the quizzes only off.
But I thought Mark said companies who listen to its users are stupid?
Even if they changed a single pixel, I accept it as an apology and an admittance of their fault. Facebook has earned my respect with this move
I think the main problem most people have with the redesign is that it took away a lot of the functionality of the previous Facebook homepage–namely feed customisation. It all got dropped to make FB a Twitter clone. My friends and I definitely use FB less after the redesign. The site, as a whole, became less useful.
Before: You can remove feeds from friends or individual apps
After: You can only remove a friend from the feed
Before: You can decide what apps show up in your homepage
After: There is no way to remove/add apps in the left column
Before: Upcoming events are highlighted
After: Only events for *today* are shown
Before: Homepage shows your current status at the top
After: Your status is mixed in with the other feeds
They’re ‘adding’ picture tagging in the feed? That was in the old feeds/homepage. They’re selling it like it’s a new feature. Event and friend invite notifications are also less prominent. This is a problem because FB has replaced Evites for me and my friends. There’s also no rhyme or reason to what shows up in the Highlights. Is it a news feed for non-status updates, or is it a place to spam ads/apps?
However, one thing they got right in the new homepage, IMO, is filtering your feed by friend lists.
Kia Ora, to those that say only 1% have complained about the new facebook then they are not taking into account standard take on a complaint. For every complaint you get there used to be said six who didn’t, they just went somewhere else. So that would suddenly make it 7%, but now in the age of the internet they are saying one person complaining can now go to 200 people. Now if that happened there wouldn’t be a face book. I have around 150 friends so far on face book. they know from my posts I am not happy with it. Others are now saying same. One person even posted ‘how come there are so many upset with Face book?” Most of those have not joined a group. so issue is much bigger than just 1%.
Facebook redesign is all messed up, they should try to switch back to the previous version.
I hate the new design. They should have a beta link first and conduct a survey on their new design
Facebook should give massages when I log in. I’m going to start a Facebook group to demand this. Also they should really give free beer. WTF is Facebook’s problem? Stingy.
The Facebook homepage is very cool, but the best homepage I’ve seen so far is sthrt.com and I would recommend checking it out.