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.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
39 responses to “Facebook Gets Even More Facebook In Its Facebook, Radically Changes Front Page”
Seems like they are determined to ruin the UI. Â I’ve been frustrated for ages by the way in which they break up the stream into “video” “Photos” and “status updates” (and others), when in fact a photo or a video *is* a status update. Â Now they are combining them all together, but instead of just doing that, they are going to automatically hide or show stuff based on what the algorithm determines? Â
Who want’s to bet that the algorithm will determine that advertisements are something we all want to see first? Â
Here’s a radical idea. Â Leave the stream alone, give us an option to see the whole stream, and leave it at that. Â
I hate Facebook
This is why I only use Facebook on my iPhone (and I use an older version I haven’t updated in a while). It’s simple, it’s clean, and doesn’t have constant UI changes. I get a steady feed of the most recent statuses (which includes pictures and videos in the same stream), I can read my messages, and accept friend requests. That’s it.Â
I think if they took the simple functionality of the iOS app and put THAT on the full website, they’d make their users very happy.Â
I have a problem: I did not receive chat bar update, now I have the old one… Anyone know how I can fix it? I had write to Facebook but I did not receive an answer. But now i got update mentioned on this post… What can I do?
What are the chances the algorithm decides advertisements are most interesting, lol.
Goodbye Facebook, have you met Myspace?
It’s bad enough that they have changed the news feeds but now they have also changed how one’s photos look…. they now have cropped the previews…. how ugly….
FB obviously doesn’t give a rat’s ass what their users are interested in. On the other hand, most FB users are lemmings, and if FB told them to reformat their hard disks, they probably would. Those of us who have a clue, whether it be owned or rented, about usability and design are definitely in the minority as FB users.
Still can’t believe it I just got a $827.89 iPad2 for only $103.37 and my mom got a $1499.99 HTV for only $251.92, they are both coming with USPS tomorrow. I would be an idiot to ever pay full retail prîces at places like Walmart or Bestbuy. I sold a 37″ HTV to my boss for $600 that I only paid $78.24 for. I use http://jmb.tw/52bf
This is why i am going to download all my photos from facebook and completely switch to google+
do you mean your chat box is on the left instead of a right sidebar. if this is the case click on the button that is next to the ‘friends on chat’ search box
I kind of like it..
i hateeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee  this new layout !
well… I can’t find that button. Here a screenshot.Â
I think clicking on the lower right “Chat (3)” button will do the trick.
when I clic that button i can see old chat box… as you can see… Could it depends because i have few friends? (23)
I don’t get what it is people are up in arms about. It barely looks any different.
Am I the only one who doesn’t think it’s that radically different? Yeah now there’s a “Top News” section at the top that shows posts that have been “liked” by a lot of people (at least I think that’s what it does). The “Top News” section isn’t even that big, at least not for me, and the recent posts below it are just like before. What’s the big deal?
I still have the old Facebook… lucky me I guess… new one looks way to busy.
Perfect timing for google+ to open up. Oh, well look at that.. They have! Hey eveyrone! There’s  this new Social Network that is like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Skype all in one! But it actually WORKS!! Â
meh.. no one ever liked my posts anyway