(Originally posted on facebook. But was that good enough for me? Noooo!)

This is a long note. Kudos to you if you get through it!

First, I am not whining about “another Facebook change.” I really liked the last major change, and I’ve liked most of the changes to design and function in the past. It’s entirely possible that I’ll get to like this version just fine. It needs some work for sure though. The following are purely my opinions, although I’ve heard a lot of the same things from other people. Some of them are, admittedly, trivial and even lame. It’s how I feel for now. If I missed anything, feel free to comment, or if you disagree, I’d like to hear why (that is, if you ever even SEE this note!).

I really don’t like this new layout because of the motivation behind it. Facebook is concerned about competing with sites like Twitter and Friendfeed’s “real time” and “live update” capacities. The problem with trying to imitate Twitter is that Facebook and Twitter are two completely different things. Twitter is inherently an open information community, while Facebook has always been a closed, private community. Twitter is also inherently simple. ALL it does is micro-updates. Facebook was always a much more personal social media site, with so many options for how people might want to share information with their chosen community. The new layout is much less personal, throwing redundant information at us out of context and essentially taking the “face” out of “Facebook.” Also, the new layout takes away a lot of what made Facebook unique from other sites. I’m on Twitter, and I like it for totally different reasons than I like Facebook. I don’t need another Twitter (and really, the actual Twitter completely pwns this Facebook).

I made this list of all the things that bug me about this new layout. Not because I plan on leaving this site, but because I like it so much and would like to see changes for the better, and soon. (And because I’m just cool like that).

Status Updates:

• Not in bold on your profile page
• Doesn’t show up on your home page at all (this makes no sense)
• blended in w/ all other info in one feed = too much info too quickly to be of any use

Photos/Albums:

• Can’t see how many photos are in an album before clicking on it. (if it only has 3 photos, I want to know about it!)
• if photos are added to an album individually, over time, they overload the news feed and crowd out status updates
• my photo comments don’t show up on my wall (w/ photo included)
• hard to see if and how many friends are tagged in albums

Feed Preferences:

• settings to “show more/less of” a person are ignored. Now we see everyone the same, regardless of what the earlier status we had
• the “hide person” option is too broad. I don’t want to hide everything a person does, but I might want to hide a specific action (like the “where should you live” quizzes!)
• overall, everything is just lumped together into one feed, and it’s information overload. The feed has too many stories that I don’t care about, when what I want is status updates, with everything else on a separate page. Kind of like it was before…hmm

Other updates: (these might be lame, but they’re part of why I like facebook, so naaah!)

• relationship status: I have found this most useful when people get engaged or married, and maybe I didn’t know about it right away, but if they post it on facebook, they want everyone to know, even if everyone isn’t a close friend. I can be happy (or sad I guess) for someone even if we aren’t close friends
• changing profile pic: I think this is still on the newsfeed, but again, it goes by too quickly for most people to see and comment
• for all of these updates, you now have to go to the friend’s page to see them. But you won’t. Because if you aren’t aware that anything is updated/changed/removed, etc, you have no reason to go to the page anymore
• the “recent updates” on the profile page are all bunched up together and don’t really make any kind of sense chronologically. I think it makes my profile page look more cluttered than before
• pokes: I keep forgetting to look for them. They should be at the top, near the birthdays
• notes: Unless I actively filter just notes, I miss a bunch of them, and I like reading other peoples’ notes most times. It was sort of intuitive before, but now you have to actively look for notes, photo updates, etc. Facebook was good when it was passive information, not active searching for info you may or may not know is even there

Applications:

• A lot of app developers are concerned that people will never know about their apps because they’ll never see anything about them on their homepages. Apps always spread virally, and now they won’t because even if something is posted to the news feed, it would be crowded out so quickly that fewer people would see it. I don’t add too many apps anyways, but I know I found out about most of them from the news feed.

Highlights section:

• this isn’t really helpful to me, because it only shows the items that people comment on/like the most, and it doesn’t really update much. The newsfeed changes every minute with info overload, and the highlights section won’t change for days
• this section really should be its own page. The sidebar is too small and it’s mixed in with advertising and events. In fact, it looks so much like advertising that I don’t look at it often, and might miss interesting things

So, there ya go. Thoughts?