Facebook friends, ready your caterwauling. The world’s largest social network has just made some drastic changes to the way the front page works in a move that will doubtlessly lead to widespread social hysteria… or at least a series of “Repost this” chain status updates.
The biggest change seems to be to the News Feed which, according to Facebook, now acts “more like your own personal newspaper.” Instead of “Top News” and “Most Recent” tabs, all news is now located in a single stream, with the most algorithmically determined “interesting” news placed at the top of the stream, and more recent items placed below.
Taking a page from Google+, Facebook is also making it easier to categorize friends through the improved friends list feature, allowing you to quickly and easily create lists of people to share with.
Finally, in what might be the most contentious change, Facebook has introduced a new friends summary panel on the top right of the page which shows a summary of your friends’ recent activity. To see more detail, just hover over an entry.
Personally, I think it’s all pretty convoluted and terrible… just another example of Facebook gradually losing touch with the ultimately simple needs of its users: they just want to stay in touch. If anything ever causes Facebook to go the way of MySpace, its going to be just this sort of feature creep.
