Wow! It’s a whole new movement, and not just a social media platform and a place to share with friends any more. It almost feels like a new Social Media Party is emerging and we will have Elections implemented pretty soon.Just watch and be amazed like I am now!
Twitter: @kickofftopic

I’m fine with the new design. I really don’t get why people get so bent out of shape about changes that are made. Regarding the Zuckerberg quote, it reminds me of a quote from Henry Ford where he said something like “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.

I really don’t care that much. Everyone gets their undies in a bunch every time something changes, and then a few weeks later they get used to things. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, and the outrage gets tiresome for me.

I find it funny that every time Facebook makes a change there is always user backlash, but its seem that after a few weeks most users have adjusted to the change and just move on. I think people are just inherently resistant to change, but if you give them time they’ll get used to it.

Great H. Ford quote, Matt. I agree with you guys - and personally I think it’s for the better. If it wasn’t for the new Facebook design, it would probably be a bit more difficult for these ‘protest’ groups to grow at such a quick rate. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

Yes- Progress is change; change is progress. But what if the change is a step backward? What if over 90% do not like it? Do you stay the course? When WindowsME was found to be a dud; did Bill Gates keep on selling it? When the Edsel was a flop, did people keep on buying it? OK, so Facebook is free, and maybe that’s a poor example. One problem is that my friend Joe sent a Rock pin to Jane, a message to Jim, and a beer to Ben; none of whom are my friends. So why is that news on my wall? Another point, where are my favorite pages? While I remember signing up for the “Obama” page, I forgot all about my favorite childhood cartoon, “Hong Kong Phooey” page and it gets lost in the bottom of the pile, so to speak. We appreciate the FB guys trying to improve stuff. And we like that we can find old school buddies, our neighborhood friends and keep in touch with families. But why the change? Did FB really need a change? And is the head FB honcho big enough to admit that he was wrong and switch back to last week’s version? Somehow- I don’t think so. Because that would be the right thing to do- the decent thing to do.

The change itself would be fine if I had a better way to filter what I see… I don’t need to see 10 separate notifications when a friend sends 10 friends free gifts. Hopefully, they add filtering by app or notification type, rather than just by friend.

Also, we seem to have lost the “so-and-so has become friends with this-other-person” (and similar) notifications that made it easier for me to find people I know. I now have to go to my friends’ profiles to see this. For a change that is supposed to make things more open, why is this type of notification suppressed now?

Seems like it went out half-baked. I currently hate it as-is. I’m not asking for them to go back to what they had before, but without some changes, unless I want to take quizzes up the wazoo, it’ll be less usable for me.

They can either keep complaining and spam the site (comment boxes, status updates) or they can depart to… myspace? Orkut? Hi5? The only way facebook will probably listen that I can think of is if a large percentage of users make an exit.

Personally, I think it’s a quest to have the #1 group the most users. 300k+ users in one group just to protest a change that really won’t change anything. If they really want to protest - cancel their accounts. The overall loss of users will get Facebook’s attention more rapidly. Get over it folks…there is still reality out there.

Exactly. Three weeks at most and we’ll all have forgotten what the old FB was like. Adapt or die.

I love the changes to pages/public profiles. So that was all good. I also love being able to filter by friends list.

The two things we need are being able to select what kind of content we want to see. There should be a list of every type of information that could be posted. Some people might check that they want to see everything like on the old live feed or only status messages or any combination of information in between. Also the option to “hide” apps like we can now hide people would be nice so we don’t have to see peeps, etc.

The second thing is the feed needs to auto update like the old live feed. With those two changes I think everything would be great!

I don’t care so much about the ‘design’ part - OK, it’s ugly and uses bigger fonts than necessary, but that I will be able to work around.

What is really making me angry is the reduction in usefulness that came with the twitterization:
* filters are gone and have been replaced with a block/only one type of post
* if I want to know what my friends are doing, I need to go to their pages on by one - groups, new friends, events, all those things are gone from the stream
* and finally the stream itself … I would have understood if they had consequently changed everything to a common design, but atm the not-really-real-time stream consists mainly of quiz notices, and a very select few tweets of my friends.

I am really disappointed and more than a little bit angry with the people in charge of facebook.

1.2% of the Facebook population doesn’t like the new layout. Whoopdie Freakin’ Do.

(175M/2.1M)

I wasn’t happy with the previous redesign because some functionality I used was lost, and a lot of commonly used items were suddenly more than a click or two away. It was more an inconvenience than anything else and I gradually found a way to do most, but not all, of what had gone.

The new design, however, is atrocious. I’ve given up using this Twitteresque feed now. Believe me, I’ve tried hard to use it as Facebook are not going to return to the old system. Since I’m not permanently logged into Facebook, I’m unable to keep up with what’s going on with my various groups of friends and associates. All the advantages of FB over Twitter have been lost.

I’ve also been evaluating FB as a suitable medium for applications development and marketing, but this aspect has been almost completely destroyed. Judging from the comments of other developers, this seems to be a widespread view - the change has not only alienated the people that use the site, it’s alienated the development ecosystem that’s help drive Facebook’s popularity.

In your settings you can go in and turn off notifications from applications. I did this awhile ago (before the new design) and it is still working with the new design.

It’s not the change itself being bad or unbearable. It’s a minor change compared to the one that brought to the previous layout.

It’s the removal of many tools aimed at customizing and personalizing the feed the thing that people hates most.

There is no way to fine tune the feed, apart from configuring Friends lists. This is bad. There should be a way to sort the feed by each and every application, and not just by the few main ones that they’ve selected.

There should be a way to get rid of too many status updates and focus on application notices, if one likes that more.

Speaking from a personal point of view, I liked to see “Jon has become friends with Peter”, and I also liked to see “Paula has become a fan of Iron Maiden”. All that is gone.

Also, maybe sometimes I wanna just reduce the presence of some friend’s activity on my feed, but not completely hide it, maybe because he’s huge fan of some sports team that I hate and 90% of his FB activity is related to this, but sometimes he still publishes something I like to read. This was previously achieved by the sliders, and now it’s impossible.

So mainly the negative side of this redesign is that they are deciding what we have to see on the feed, and we have very little options to change it.

If they’d bring back more customization tools, the design itself could be pretty fine.

oh and btw they announced “streaming feed”. That means it should be scrolling without page refresh, just like the old “Live feed” did.

But it could also become annoying, because they have decided to merge the Public Profiles in it, and it would mean the feed scrolling away fast in few seconds and make it impossible to read… uhmmm

This is not a matter of change! I loved the previous change and never complained before… This one is a decrease on information! Where are the new friendships, photo tagging, group/pages joining, event participation, relationship status etc ?. All those should be added to the News Feed or to a Live Feed stream as they are an important part of a social network!

On Mark Zuckerberg’s fan page thing he had this as a status as of 133am today:

“In Florida visiting my grandparents. Right now I’m reading feedback from users and looking at some updated designs that include ideas from people’s comments.”

I like that apps have more access to the home page, but we need to be able to block apps (I hate quizes!)

Also, think about what has been removed. The old home page had 4 tabs: feed, status updates, photos, and live feed.

The new home pages is basically just status updates and you have to refresh for them to be live.

So that’s quite a bit lost, not to mention the highlights sidebar is worthless and rarely updates over the day.

Zuck is way too focused on Twitter, and this may be the beginning of a slow MySpace-style death for Facebook.

I like the change although I agree with a number of people who feel that some of the features of the last version should be reintroduced into this design/version. One feature I didn’t appreciate enough until it was gone was the news stream auto-refresh. I’d like to see that reintroduced.

I believe that Facebook would be well served looking at the feedback they are getting, directly and indirectly, and improving the current version by incorporating the features the vocal minority most want returned/added. More control over filters and a live stream option must surely fit into the new Facebook vision?

Wow! I’ve read through the comments and I am one of those who hate the new Facebook. I don’t like that I can’t tell immediately the difference between a wallpost and a status update. I don’t like that I missed important news from several pages because they were hidden. I don’t like that this new look was simply thrown at us without a warning or anything. I hate the “highlights” which somehow seem to have disappeared completely today. I dislike that removal of so many of the filters and tweaks that I had available to me before.

I have joined a group against this change, not because I think it will make a difference, but to register my dissatisfaction.

To everyone who says that if I don’t like it that much I should leave, I disagree. I have friends here, not on myspace. I have apps I am invested in here. This is my home and someone just walked in and rearranged all my furniture without consulting me.

Do I expect Facebook to go back? No. But I have to admit, I liked the “new” Facebook that so many others were up in arms over. I thought it worked very well. This doesn’t work nearly as well and limits me compared to what I had. I call that a step backwards in functionality.

If you don’t like aspects of the new design, clearly articulate them like a few commenters here have done.

People sure love to jump on the bandwagon of hate every time there is a change in technology.

Part of growing is adapting to change. Get used to it.

I don’t think facebook should go back to its old self, I think it should improve according to the desires of the majority.

I hate the new layout, and not because I resist change as a rule. I actually thought the previous change they made to Facebook was an improvement. I thought it cleaned things up into easy-to-understand categories, and expanded the way I considered FB could be used. This new layout is a huge step backwards. All the stuff that made the last improvement great is gone, but none of what made the old old version charming remains, either. It’s a mess.

Truthfully, I think people would use a variety of social networks if people would rally and demand their social data information be portable. Once implemented, Facebook would not be able to ride roughshod over their users. So why don’t the users just switch social networks? Because the totality of our friends aren’t on other websites like they are on facebook. Facebook has just done too good a job accumulating and mapping our social graphs. So some might argue that this feat justifies their sole discretion in changing how they use and interact with our data. But it shouldn’t be that way. These causes would have more influence if data portabilty was a reality and Facebook would actually listen to its users.

I think this is a warning sign about the future of FB and it’s current leadership.

Thanks Nick for keeping me on top of Facebook changes. Maybe this iteration of changes is a step back but I am looking forward to the next giant leap in user experience. It is a process.

I’m against the new design. The news feed is a crap!

I love the fact that I can filter the feed by friend groups. This was a terrific upgrade IMO, letting my check in on clients separately than high school friends. However I do miss seeing relationship updates (ie Friend 1 is now friends with x or Friend 1 became a fan of Y) and the ability to fine tune the feed by apps etc.

“One thing that is well know about Facebook users is that despite their widespread support of President Obama (he has the most popular page on Facebook), many users are not supportive of change.”

Nick, that is the single most goddamn stupid sentence you have ever written. Facebook layouts have nothing to do with users’ political views. You should be embarrassed you wrote that.

Also, Facebook’s preview page didn’t say they were taking away all the filters, and didn’t even mention the changes they were making to user profile pages (users can’t control story size, and stories are posted out of chronological order now). Facebook’s preview of the new layout was basically a big fat lie.

This new UI is much less FUN and USEFUL. Taking away the real-time, time-stamped info. about what users friends were doing (becoming friends, joining groups, commenting on pic’s) degraded FBs utility immensely. Now all we get are broadcast yells from random people on inane subjects cluttering the homepage. And everywhere I look it’s thumbnails of my ugly mug: the UI team must be made up of narcissists given all the pictures of ourselves users now are subjected to on all the pages. Simply awful redesign. The previous iteration was much better, and I embrace change.

As for the comment above that only 2% have voiced displeasure - those are the active, engaged users and they sought out various means of expressing displeasure very quickly. It’s a big percentage of the “right” demo. My friends (older, more money) universally hate it. Tedious, garish and boring are the comments most commonly used.

I don’t mind the new layout, per se.

That said, I mind the fact that the highlights on the right are useless to me, and push down what I do like to check — old fashioned Poke messages and possible friends that I might know. I want a way to minimize or set the number of items shown in the highlights.

In the middle, what happened to the time stamps? What happened to the live feed model (real time updates). Give me an option for showing these things as one liners (like the old livefeed, which I defaulted to) so I can see more than four or five things at a time. Give me the option to turn on or off those damned picture icons. Let me view this thing by friend list, application, or type of update like the old livefeed did (that little down arrow it had).

Why isn’t the left sidebar being used for much? Why did the applications get removed, I have to use the bottom bar for them now. Why is that little share link icon thing on the left sidebar actually a different application than the old share link one (which is at least still availble in the applictions, but now I have to remember to avoid hitting that icon on the left and use the one on the bottom.

Meh.

Info overload. I left.

People like drama. This is a real life soap opera: People wasting their time complaining about something that is FREE to use. Unbelievable. Aren’t there more important things in life to REALLY be concerned about?

I don’t care about the layout changes. I care that I cannot filter by application. I’m not interested in everyone’s quiz results and, as I understand it, I have to add each dang quiz application my friends use, and then block the feed from that application (because I can only filter by friend; not by application, unless I have added that application). Obviously, this is a daunting task, and an uphill battle.

Please, Facebook, give me the ability to block applications from my news feed without adding them, and from the live feed page itself. I’m ready to leave FB, because it’s turning into a bunch of useless information about who prefers what color and what cartoon character so-and-so should be. If it isn’t fixed within a few days, I’m going to defriend all friends who use these applications.

I, too, miss the truly social and interactive components of the old feed — who befriends whom, who posts photos, etc. Keep the layout, fine. Keep the live feed. But WE NEED FILTERS BADLY. I am only “checking” my FB page once a day now; used to be 8 or 9 times a day.

I’m engaged in using FB for marketing in higher education, and I’m ready to throw in the towel.

I’m normally the type of person that makes fun of people that reflexively complain about any type of change - in fact, I really liked the Facebook redesign last year a lot since it made sure that profiles didn’t devolve into a MySpace-esque pages overloaded with loud applications. However, the problem with the new Facebook, as others have alluded to, is that this new change takes AWAY functionality that was there before. This is a whole lot different complaint than the standard “I hate how it looks now and want the old page back” screams and cannot be resolved by the corresponding standard retort of “Change always happens and you’ll get used to it in a few weeks”.

While it’s good that we are be able to create lists and filters for feeds (which is what supporters of the new Facebook always point to), it’s also an “all or nothing” approach with respect to what you see from your friends - you either see everything from them or, if you filter people out, you’ll see nothing at all. I DON’T want to exclude any friends from my news feed entirely - what I want is to exclude certain activities and application updates from my news feed while highlighting the items that I care about a lot more (i.e. who’s befriending who, relationship statuses, pictures, etc.). The problem is that I have friends that I want to keep tabs on in terms of substantive information, but if they are heavy users of applications that I don’t care about, then I’ll end up having no choice but to filter them out entirely in order to prevent my news feed from being inundated with updates about movie quizzes and throwing sheep. If Facebook can simply bring back to more nuanced “radio dial” feature of choosing as to what level of updates that you want to receive with respect to certain friends, stories, and activities, then I think it will go a long way in improving assuaging the anger over the new design.

Facebook is BROKEN, not the design.

Test it for yourself here. http://post.ly/Bos