Users have been in a tizzy over the latest Facebook updates that were rolled out two weeks ago. Since then Facebook has been listening to the feedback and this evening they announced some changes that will be coming in the future days and weeks ahead. While there is no doubt that there are substantial changes ahead, Facebook has highlighted the top changes that they will be making.
Live Stream
When Facebook announced the new design a couple weeks ago, they suggested that there would be a “real-time feed” and many users expected that to mean that the feed would be streaming without being forced to refresh the page. Users will now have the option to stream the the content in real-time similar to the way that the previous “live feed” was displayed.
Photo Tags
As a couple commenters articulated in my article earlier today about granular feed filters, there was plenty of content which was not displaying in the primary feed. Stories related to friends that were tagged in photos will now show up in the primary feed.
Granular Feed Filters
I wrote about the concept of granular feed filters only hours ago and it appears that Facebook will be implementing some of these filters which includes the ability to filter out specific application content. Don’t want to hear about your friend who just took a quiz about which Sex in the City character they are? No worries, you won’t have to hear about that anymore.
Improved Highlights Feature
One other thing that many commenters have been saying is that the “Highlights” area of the feed is not extremely useful. According to Facebook, that feature will be adjusted to “show you more content throughout the day to mirror more closely the content that the earlier News Feed provided.”
Greater Request Prominence
One of the final changes that users can expect to see in the near future is greater prominence of friend and event requests, which will now display in the right hand column, where they were before. Right now requests are grouped into two segments at the top of the feed but many users have been complaining about them.
Conclusion
It’s clear that Facebook rolled out the new design as quick as possible to handle the competition from Twitter. The result was a large backlash from users but Facebook will not move back to the old design. Instead, they will push forward to add features that make the new design more usable for the users. The changes announced this evening are a small segment of more changes that will come in the next weeks and months.
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it is about moving forward now ..
Comment by Facebook User — March 24, 2009 @ 4:39 pm
The greater request prominence is needed ASAP. As a founder of a site that is heavily reliant on Facebook Connect it threatens to put a halt to our momentum. Thankfully it has not yet but over a long period of time I expect it to have an adverse effect for both us (in terms of attaining new members) and for FB (in terms of the utilty of the FB Connect concept) if it is not addressed.
Comment by Facebook User — March 24, 2009 @ 4:40 pm
Yes, agreed with the nameless chap above me. Request prominence has been a pretty brutal thing to deal with.
Comment by Tyler Willis — March 24, 2009 @ 4:44 pm
I'm just glad they didn't revert to the old style (I actually like the new design).
Comment by Hugh Isaacs II — March 24, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
Aside from the app spam issue, I don't see many of the major functionality issues addressed here. Were people really complaining that much about having friend requests in the middle instead of on the right?
This looks like crumbs. Weak.
Comment by Shauna Wright — March 24, 2009 @ 5:26 pm
Good steps..
Can we hope in having Friends activity back into the feed? (Friendships, relationships, fan pages subscriptions, etc.)
Comment by Facebook User — March 24, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
I'm feeling somewhat angry about that announcement. Mind you, not because they decided to return some of the core functionality removed by the downgrade back to facebook, this is good news.
What I cannot stand is the hypocrisy. They did not dumb down facebook to help me 'share with the people (I) care about'; it was a thinly veiled move to copy twitter and increase ad sales by allowing product pages to pretend to be (and interact with me like) my friends.
If they at least had the honesty to tell me 'we hope you like the service, but we have to make some money', I'd grudgingly accept the changes, but lying to my face about how I will love the new things they did for me makes me sick to my stomach!
Comment by Gerhard — March 24, 2009 @ 5:56 pm
Great news! Feeling much relieved. Is there any hope of being able to filter friend activity by status only? Like the good old days?
Comment by Nuzhat M. Karim — March 24, 2009 @ 6:08 pm
I would like to see more friend activity on the feed as well.
Comment by Facebook User — March 24, 2009 @ 7:33 pm
What about who is friending who and what not? They did not mention anything about that being put back into the live feed.
I like what I hear though.
Comment by Mike — March 24, 2009 @ 9:03 pm
Great companies listen to their users, and act accordingly.
Bravo, Facebook!
@Nick – Great stuff on granular feeds today; you are right on the money, and it seems as though FB heard you!
Comment by Bruce Barber — March 24, 2009 @ 9:54 pm
Changing the site every few months is really really annoying. I'm still not over the previous change made 8 months ago and the fact that apps went under a tab that surely no one bothers to check, heck, even I don't! (well, I try to pay them a visit every once in a while just to see how are they doing over there and that's about it).
And now this tweet live obsession thing! Like friends are updating their status or publisher (or whatever it's called these days) every milisecond and god forbid I'm not getting it in real time, up to the very milisecond, will I survive? C'mon!! Re-redesigning the site just for that and creating such a mess over it?!?!
Wouldn't it be easier to add another tab to the old-new homepage and hocus pocous there you go, keep yourself informed, updated, streamed, flowed, flooded, live-fed and so on as much as you want and at the same time we (aka facebookers) would still have our old-new homepage + status addicts tab for the tweet addicts?
Gosh, it's that simple!
Comment by An Impatient User — March 25, 2009 @ 1:05 am
My thoughts: (apologies if the comment it too long).
*** 1: The new design didn't add significant functionality.
1a- The old design already had live updates (actually live though), and filtering by friend group, status, photos, etc.
1b- The only "new" functionality was to filter by 3rd party applications – most of which are rubbish.
1c- Indeed, the old functionality of being able to dial up or down what and who you found interesting – it's gone.
*** 2: The new design is "dumb", rather than intelligent.
2a- The old "social graph" algorithm worked for me. It digested hundreds of friends and thousands of "data" into a digestible, interesting, useful home page.
2b- The new stream is always the last hour, and if I didn't block every 3rd party app I find, it would probably be littered with quizzed and sheep throwing. Further, since I check Facebook late at the end of the day, my home stream is almost exclusively west coast people, instead of my local friends who are most interesting to me.
2c- Twitter is about the "stream", it was founded as a micro-blog. Facebook is NOT about the stream – it was founded as, and ought to be, an intelligent address book that functions like a yearbook, collecting memories with photos, and your friends scribbled notes on the inside "walls" of the book.
MOST IMPORTANT TO ME:
*** 3: The new design reverts Facebook back to 2005.
3a- Profile changes (groups joined, relationship status, interest changes) are left completely unpublished, and thus we're left having to go profile to profile, and trying to remember what was and was not there, in order to find out some of the most interesting aspects of our friends (for me, namely, their relationship statuses – completely and totally obscure now).
3b- The new highlights section has SOME group joins, and you can even hack the URL to filter by groups, but neither are nearly as sufficient as the old Home Feed. And of course, it's cramped, minimal in number, and absolutely not customizable, so I don't count it.
***
Just one more thought: I do agree that there is some truth in the idea that companies who are bold and not afraid to go against their customers from time to time do end up pioneering some good ideas, however here's how this is different:
This isn't Ford or Apple, Facebook is not selling a product, it's dealing in the exchange of *our* contributions, *our* data. Facebook doesn't just make money from us – Facebook is ABOUT us.
If Facebook wants to abandon what we're here for and try and be some player in this new microblogging Twitter market, then it should spin off another site, or at very least, retain the important address book/ yearbook functionality in a meaningful way rather than attempt to Steve Jobs'ianly force its will on us by telling us "You don't really want to connect with old friends… you want to discover new ones," – because that's wrong.
Comment by Tollie Williams — March 25, 2009 @ 1:42 am
What people seem to want, including myself, is the old Live Feed with the new filters and some more new filters so we can regulate exactly the type of information we want to see. I really was shocked when the new fb launched and that wasn’t what was done. It looks like they’re heading that way now.
Comment by Jeremy Couch — March 25, 2009 @ 3:11 am
It wasn't too long to read, Tollie. I read all the comments…
It really upsets me. Needless to say I haven't been checking my Facebook since the redesign took place but I do read what the media has to say.
I don't get it, if I wanted to join Twitter I would have joined it by now, wouldn't I?
Clearly, we don't like it so instead of coming up with more "new" "brilliant" (as if..) ideas to "improve" this bad joke, why not just bring back the old new design and add this "improvment" under a tab to satisfy us all? How come no one came up with this idea?
Beats me…
Comment by An Impatient User — March 25, 2009 @ 4:54 am
What about Events in newsfeed? Not being able to see at a glance the Events that friends have accepted has reduced the value of fb. It used to be great to see new events without effort.
Comment by artsworker — March 25, 2009 @ 5:49 am
conclusion – they are just fixing what was OK in previous design and was messed with the “redesign”. I can’t understand this – they return photo tags back, but what about other notifications, which were for many people also useful? Will they with small steps revert the messed things back, calling it “improvement” ?
there are four main mistakes with current redesign:
- Hiding of notification caused rapid drop of viral spread of all information around the facebook (people are having less new friends, pages are having less pageviews and fans, people watch less photos because of tags notoficaiton hidden, people are engaged in less groups because arent able to see, which groups are joined by others etc.) I have serveral pages and their pageviews and new fans numbers are dropping by 70% since the redesign.
- configuration of the stream – let people choose what to see and vlock what not to see anymore. I hope they are working on this, as current state pushes people to spend less time on facebook, as they dont see what they want and see crappy content
- usability issues – when someone added more pictures, they appear one by one in the stream. That is simply a mistake, there is a no need to see them all. Also several other mistakes of this kind. Also information on profile pages arent sorted by time anymore
- Typography and page “real-estate” issues – in former version, various types of information has their typography according to their relevance and importance. Now everything is messed in one format. Large white space in lower left column is just a waste of space.
Comment by Misha — March 25, 2009 @ 5:56 am
I think this is the perfect opportunity for myspace to take over this community. If Myspace will offer it's users what they want and Facebook won't then people will move in droves to myspace. Listen to your users facebook execs! WE don't want a twitter clone!
Comment by Daniel — March 25, 2009 @ 9:20 am
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!
Comment by Manos Matsakis — March 25, 2009 @ 9:40 am
I agree with Manos. Why friend stories were ever removed is a huge mystery. The point of the site is to find people and see what they're doing.
It's hard to do that without seeing who is friending who. But the mobile site still has it, that makes me really wonder if they're just going mobile.
Comment by Mike — March 25, 2009 @ 10:58 am
It time for someone to launch "Classic Facebook". I do not know how long I can putup with the twittered facebook.
Comment by Steve — March 25, 2009 @ 12:36 pm
i have one simple request.
PUT MY PROFILE ACTIVITY BACK. IN. CHRONOLOGICAL. ORDER.
that my 'recent activity' ends up behind a bunch of older content now just pisses me off now. It keeps moving around. There's no order. This is so useful. &$#@!
i lied. I have 2 requests:
enough of the 13pt font. I can read.
Comment by brian — March 25, 2009 @ 8:51 pm
It is great to see that facebook puts that much attention to its users. Otherwise it would be impossible for them to thrive as they have. Heard many complaints, glad to see they are doing something about it.
Comment by Jorge Blanco — March 25, 2009 @ 9:08 pm