Although the latest Facebook homepage changes seem relatively minor compared to some of the more drastic moves the company has made in the past, there are once again hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users voicing their frustration.
The most visible group to emerge so far: “PLEASE GIVE US OUR OLD NEWS FEED BACK!” (caps and exclamation point included). The group will likely cross 500,000 members this morning, as more users catch wind of their friends joining it via the News Feed.
While much of the frustration seems like the usual anger and resistance to change you always see when any major website pushes a redesign, I have heard a few valid complaints about the new Facebook (
):
1. The “Live Feed” isn’t all that live. Seemingly, you need to refresh to see new stuff, as there are no alerts when new content is available. That’s not completely true: if you’re viewing the “News Feed,” you’ll get alerts when new content is available, but that’s not immediately clear.
2. The “News Feed” isn’t very good. The goal of the feature is to be a digest of what’s important in your network, much like “Highlights” in the previous iteration. My own opinion: I’d give it a B- … most of the stories seem interesting, though nearly 24 hours old at this point. Given the “Live Feed” now includes more information and is hence more cluttered, it would seem the “News Feed” should be more up-to-date to emphasize important happenings.
3. Facebook didn’t give much warning about the changes. Unlike previous iterations where announcements were prominently placed on member homepages, Facebook seemingly just flipped the switch on this change without doing much to prepare users.
Facebook did address a number of issues that members had with the previous iteration by re-adding information like new friends of friends and changes in relationship status into the feed, and by moving events and birthdays back above the fold. However, those issues seem like they were light years ago and mostly forgotten.
The problem here seems to be that Facebook didn’t add much in the way of new and exciting, but rather just made a few incremental changes that make sense from a UI perspective, but once again frustrate and confuse those that are resistant to change (and don’t read Facebook’s blog … or Mashable (
)).
Will it blow over? You have to think so given Facebook’s history of surviving far more significant revolts. Further, the issues with this latest change seem fairly easy for the social network to address with small tweaks to the product.
