I’ve been on Facebook for a couple years now and have gone back and forth with my opinion of it. One of the things I liked about it at first was the ability to connect with friends quickly and easily. I also liked that it had a clean look to the layout.
Later Facebook allowed 3rd-party applications to be added and we saw a crazy explosion of individuality expressed on profile pages. They were becoming cluttered, long, and a bit unwieldy. I began to drift away from using it as much in part for this reason (the other being it is a walled garden and I’m not a fan of that but that’s a discussion for another time).
Very recently Facebook has been rolling out a new design to their layout. At first I wasn’t sure where some of my stuff was moved to and there are still some things I don’t like. However, the more I look at the main profile page, I realize there is a huge potential for Facebook to become an awesome tool for connecting and communicating. It’s this issue I want to focus on; publishing and interacting inside Facebook has never been easier or more complete than this.
Update Status
Facebook has always provided a few ways to publish content to your own profile. The most common way is to update your status – a short line that is usually a statement of “I am …” It’s not always used that way, but that status is published out to all of your friends so they know what you are up to. With the new design, updating your status is at the top of your page and the dominant feature highlighted and now asks “What are you doing right now?”
Wall
The new head or top of a profile page has moved into tabs. You can see I’ve added a couple tabs from a couple of applications I like (a Clemson Fan and a USA Olympics Fan). The part I see as huge is that the first tab, the wall, is now the focus. Earlier the wall (basically a public discussion board) could be buried in a long page. The wall is used as one of the main ways to communicate with others by leaving short messages for the person. Now it is easy to find the wall and leave a message since it’s always at the top.
All Posts
Facebook is now aggregating all of the activity that one publishes along with comments from others into one chronological flow. If you share a link, write a post, import something from outside of Facebook, or publish photos it will all be reflected in the All Posts section. It is now easier to find all published content in the order it was published.
Commenting
Facebook has allowed comments on just about every sort of content you publish except for your status. People would get around it by commenting on that person’s wall but when the status changed, often that wall comment didn’t make sense. Now since your status is integrated into your main content, each item can have a discussion in context.
My Summary
What I’m seeing with this new Facebook design is that communication is much faster and easier than before. Interaction is encouraged and is more sensible. Some veterans of Facebook aren’t happy with the new design but I suspect it’s because they aren’t seeing it in this light. It seems Facebook is now catching up to some of the other hot web 2.0 content publishing applications and improving on what they do well:
- Microblogging: Facebook Status Update like Twitter
- Blogging: Facebook Notes
- Bookmarking: Facebook Links like Delicious or Digg
- Photos: Facebook Photos like Flickr
- Discussion Board: Facebook Wall
- Lifestream: Facebook All Posts like FriendFeed
For another perspective on this check out MakeUseOf.com’s article Finding Your Way Around The New Facebook.
By the way, you can friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, or follow my lifestream on FriendFeed if you like.
