The Social

Some looks at the new AOL branding.

(Credit: AOL)

It's the media equivalent of moving out of your parents' house, heading to the nearest tattoo and piercing parlor, and yelling FREEEEEEDOM!: AOL has unveiled the "new brand identity" for its post-Time Warner era, slated to begin December 10 when it begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company. And there's nary a blue triangle in sight. Instead, there's a plain new text logo presented with various backdrops, from cartoon scribbles to a rock-star hand symbol to a totally adorable goldfish.

The company is currently offering just a preview, and says in a release that a full unveil will come on the spin-off date. Yay, secrets! I love secrets! But we, of course, have many hints: like the fact that CEO Tim Armstrong, who joined the company in March after a long stint as a high-profile Google sales executive, keeps talking up AOL's future as a powerhouse in digital content and publishing. The company's array of niche blogs, which were hatched when AOL purchased Weblogs way back in 2005, are now its centerpiece.

So the new mood? "It's one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal," the release explained. Ooh, sexy!

The release also included a soundbite from Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins, which AOL enlisted to help with the transformation: "AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression, this required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational."

Of course, it's not all sunny: The company is on the verge of significant layoffs, as well as the possible chucking of non-"content" properties like ICQ and MapQuest, as the spinoff date grows closer.

Whatever. Isn't that goldfish cute?

A look at the newly tweaked Facebook homepage.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook members will start to see a new look for their home page "news feeds" on Friday, with the design now featuring a toggle view between a main view, featuring the top stories from their friends list based on their Facebooking habits, and a "live feed" featuring real-time updates from their whole network.

"When the user wakes up in the morning, you go to Facebook and you see (the) news feed," product manager Peter Deng told CNET News. "You see the stuff that you missed, the best of the previous day, to basically catch you up on what your friends have been up to."

This is sort of bringing Facebook's design back to an earlier version. This spring, likely inspired by the hype surrounding Twitter's "stream," Facebook converted its home page news feed into a feed of live updates and relegated "highlights" to a small column on the right side of the page. Plenty of members absolutely hated it, even though Facebook execs have since said that the redesign didn't result in a drop in traffic or usage.

Deng said that the design released Friday, which will be rolling out to the social network's massive user base over the course of the day starting at 10 a.m. PDT, was put together by "responding to a lot of feedback along the way."

Birthday and event alerts are now more prominent, and the news feed also contains stories that stopped appearing when Facebook launched the stream-inspired home page: relationship status news, photos added and tagged, and the like. Brands' fan pages will be worked in there, too, but Deng said Facebook does not allow them to pay for higher placement or prominence. User controls will stay the same: you can opt to see fewer updates from a given person or fan page.

The upcoming redesign was leaked earlier this week via a document distributed to advertisers. But Deng said that the company has "made a few user interface tweaks since then."

Facebook's Groups feature seemed to have long since taken a backseat to the "fan pages" that the social network has encouraged companies and brands to create. But they're far from obsolete.

In a Monday blog post called "Giving Groups a Stronger Voice," Facebook has announced a number of ways it has improved Groups, to better match the rest of the site and more closely tie to members' activity feeds.

"Group activities, which previously only appeared in the group, will now be delivered to your news feed," the post by Facebook engineer Knot Pipatsrisawat read. These updates will be restricted to those that come from people already on your friends list, which is key, since many groups have thousands--or even millions--of members.

"For example, you now will see a story when your friend uploads photos from a recent party at your high school alumni group, or when one of your friends posts a message on the wall of your pick-up soccer group, saying that there is a special game this week," according to Pipatsrisawat's post.

A look at the new 'Groups' design on Facebook.

(Credit: Facebook)

Additionally, the home page of a group has been modified to look more like a regular member profile or fan page, complete with a news feed and "publisher" field. Basically, this gives yet another Facebook feature a dose of the "real-time stream." The blog post adds that this is currently available to a small number of users and will be available more widely "in the coming days."

The updates come as Facebook previews some home page improvements to advertisers. But the Groups redesign is geared toward ordinary users, not brands, Facebook says.

"Groups are for fostering member-to-member collaboration, while Pages remain the best way to broadcast messages to your fans, if you are a business, organization, public figure, or other entity," Pipatsrisawat's post explained.

Meanwhile, the other big player in real-time content, Twitter, started the beta test rollout of its own grouping, or "lists," feature last week. Those are fairly different, though, as Twitter users are encouraged to create their own lists of recommended members that other users can follow with one click.

Guess what? Facebook is tweaking its home page design yet again--something that invariably seems to tick off members at first before they realize they actually don't mind that much. The company seems to have been previewing the new look to advertisers, one of whom forwarded the details along to industry blog Mashable.

It doesn't look too different. The biggest change is that Facebook's home page news feed will now be divided up into "top news" and a more real-time "recent activity" view.

The explanation:

"Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent."

A screenshot from a document that Facebook sent to brand advertisers about an impending redesign.

(Credit: Facebook)

Note the mention of birthday reminders. On a given member's birthday, a pop-up version of Facebook's "gifts" application appears on that user's profile so that friends can purchase virtual gifts to display. The "gifts" feature is also currently the center of the fledgling e-commerce plans that Facebook has been bouncing around for quite some time now: It's currently the hub of its "credits" virtual currency, and advertisers can purchase sponsored gifts that members can give to one another. These have also been tested out with a select number of nonprofits.

For users, it sounds like Facebook is correcting some of the changes that members seemed to complain about the most with its last redesign. "Facebook has also put information back into the stream that people have asked for, including photo tags, friend acceptances, relationships, event RSVPs and group memberships," the explanation obtained by Mashable read. Also in there will be information about what a user's friends do on brands' "fan" pages, potentially increasing the exposure for advertisers and marketers looking to jump on the social-ads bandwagon.

Why so much redesigning? Facebook's executive team likes to pitch the company as a living, evolving product. At an event last week in Palo Alto, Calif., Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg underscored Facebook's belief in constant "iteration," a term you'll also often hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg using.

"The great thing about Facebook is (that) we are constantly evolving the site and constantly evolving the usage," she said. "People protested the new home page redesign, but engagement went way up and users continued to grow."

Dear Person Who Constantly Tweets About What He Or She Is Eating For Breakfast,

Twitter is not all about you anymore. Now go drown your sorrows in a bottle of delicious maple syrup that you're about to pour on that giant stack of blueberry pancakes.

Indeed, the microblogging service unveiled Tuesday its revamped home page, which doesn't change anything for people who are already using Twitter--it's just a different look and feel for twitter.com if you haven't logged in.

"Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved," co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the company blog. "Twitter began as a rudimentary social tool based on the concept of status messages but together with those who use it every day, the service has taught us what it wants to be."

Deep.

So what's new? Well, the interface is cleaned up and is a little more aesthetically pleasing, with Twitter's bird mascot now fluttering around a Twitter logo vaguely set up to be a sunburst emerging from some fluffy clouds. (They sure do think highly of themselves over there!) There's a big Twitter Search button to "see what people are saying about" a given topic, putting the service's utility front and center. Then there is a roster of trending topics by the hour, day, and week.

Twitter's mantra has changed from "What are you doing?" to "Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world." Chances are, new visitors to Twitter.com are checking it out because they've heard about it in the news--or even integrated into news coverage, as the likes of CNN and MSNBC have started doing. The new language reflects that.

And when you click the "Sign up now" button? You're invited to "join the conversation." Yeah, that's right. Now think about whether "the conversation" really wants to hear about that pint of Ben & Jerry's you're about to dig into.

"We're eager to see if encouraging a sense of wonder and discovery leads to a better first impression of Twitter," Stone concluded in his blog post. So let me get this straight: Twitter has evolved into a 140-character magical mystery tour with a pretty cartoon bird to lead the way. Insert your favorite Harold and Kumar joke here!

Twitter will give your business wings, or at the very least, it will send along some cute cartoon birds to carry your briefcase for you.

(Credit: Twitter)

Twitter's home page definitely gets some Zen cred by consisting of little more than a text field that asks, "What are you doing?" But that's apparently about to change.

According to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, there will very soon be a major revamp to Twitter.com.

The reason is to give potential Twitter users--you know, the ones who are curious about what these "tweets" on CNN are--a better idea of exactly what the service is and what they can do with it.

This is slated to launch next week.

"You can try (Twitter) out without having to sign up, so you can get an idea of what Twitter is before you use it," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told AllThingsD. "We need to do a better job of explaining ourselves to people who hear about us and then have no idea what do to."

Part of this has gone live already: a section called "Twitter 101," geared toward businesses that want to use the microblogging service for publicity, marketing, or customer relations. Co-founder Biz Stone announced this in a blog post on Thursday evening.

"We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies," Stone wrote. "The results demonstrate how customers are getting value out of Twitter and suggest techniques businesses can employ to enhance that value."

This is important because of troubling (albeit unofficial) statistics that Twitter's ubiquity may be fleeting. The majority of new users reportedly don't stick around, and third-party studies have found that a small number of active members are responsible for the vast majority of "tweets."

Getting a "real" home page could also be key for future revenue opportunities on Twitter's end. The site is so lightweight that many avid users rarely access it at all, instead using third-party clients like Twhirl or TweetDeck. For Twitter, which still doesn't have a head of sales, getting people back to its homepage could be the first step in making a buck or two off it.

The new Facebook inbox.

(Credit: Facebook)

Well, according to a post on the official Facebook blog, the social network's messaging feature is getting a much-needed revamp from its cruddy, bare-bones state. Select users have the new in-box now; it'll be rolling out to everyone else over the next few weeks.

The catch is that there aren't actually very many new features, just a better presentation of existing ones for the most part. You'll now be able to accomplish such technological marvels as filter your in-box for unread messages (wow!) and flag unwanted messages as spam.

There's also a more clearly delineated division between messages from friends on your friends list and updates from brands' "fan pages" that previously all went into the same in-box.

Some more updates are on the way. "Over time, we plan to migrate messages from Groups and Events to Updates as well, so you have more control over the communication you receive," the post by Facebook's Scott Marlette read. That means the message from the guy who just reconnected with you on Facebook after not speaking to you since the fourth-grade spider-in-the-lunchbox incident will have a different destination than the message to all guests of next week's Bocce ball tournament.

So, no, Facebook probably won't be replacing your e-mail client yet. But more importantly--it's prettier. Oh, and you can flag spam now--that's important.

These days, in this world of IKEA and Target and "Project Runway," we like to think we know about design. We also like to think that the biggest names in Silicon Valley know what they're doing design-wise.

Yet recently, we saw two of the Web's most prominent players hit by design-related snafus: first, the continuing brouhaha over Facebook's latest home page redesign, which many users claim makes the service more difficult to use; and second, the departure of Douglas Bowman, a high-ranking Google designer who accompanied his resignation with a blog post detailing his frustration over the company's data-above-all mantra.

They were different issues, for sure. The Facebook fiasco was one of user experience. The social network, its massive user base now bringing in plenty of people who certainly don't fit the profile of the young and tech-savvy early adopter, sprang a Twitter-like revamp that threw many users off guard. After complaints, a few tweaks were made, but some critics say it's still not enough.

"It makes you feel like there's a lot more to digest, and it's all happening right now," said Whitney Hess, a New York-based user experience consultant. "It's a bit of an information overload because it takes up almost all of the real estate of the entire home page."

Google's reason for making headlines in the design world of late, meanwhile, was all about something much more internal. Bowman implied that he was unable to synchronize his visual-design expertise with Google's mission to index all the information that it possibly can. That meticulous, almost card catalog-like attitude didn't carry over so well with him.

"Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better," Bowman, who had been hired at Google three years ago to start its visual-design team, wrote on his blog. "I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that."

Within hours of being published, thousands of people "liked" Product Director Christopher Cox's message to Facebook users, saying the company would be addressing the outcry over its latest redesign.

(Credit: Jennifer Guevin/CNET)

If Google's problem is excessive attention to data, Facebook's is an insistence on being at the forefront of communication. In other words, the difference between the two is that Google wouldn't change its products enough for the approval of a design professional like Bowman, but that Facebook (at least according to some users) was too willing to change in order to fit what it sees as the future of the industry.

In this case, it was the "information stream" made popular by Twitter--which, though it's a fraction of Facebook's size, has supplanted the social network as the hot name in connecting across the expanse of the Web.

With its new design, Facebook was effectively telling users that it intended them to start using the site for a different purpose, Hess said. "People are starting to get the sense that Facebook is changing what problems it's trying to solve," Hess said in an interview. "It started out being about connections, and it started to become about content, not just who you're friends with but what your friends are up to."

But at their core, both Facebook and Google were showing symptoms of the same problem: seduction by information, and the resulting disconnect between data and design. With its home page revamp, Facebook highlights the stream of content that its 175 million members are constantly pouring into its servers--links, images, videos, the random thoughts that make up "status messages"--and with its new "Share" interface, it encourages them to contribute even more.

That sort of extreme wealth of data must make anyone with access to the back-end operations at Facebook and Google--or, heck, even just your run-of-the-mill analytics junkie--simply giddy. But the face that a mainstream Web company puts forward is a visual one. And that can lead to quite the disconnect.

Hess pointed out the fact that when Google launched its Gmail e-mail client, there was no one-click "delete" button. "Google's response was, 'We gave you a gigabyte of space; you don't need one,'" she explained. "It was a technically focused response instead of realizing the real reason people want to delete their e-mail isn't because they want to make more digital space; they want to make space in their minds. They want to not have to look at something if they have an emotional response to it."

The backlash at Facebook's redesign is ironic, considering its clean, blue-and-white interface had typically gotten the thumbs-up from the design-conscious--especially as an alternative to its brasher, then-larger rival MySpace.

"There were other solutions out there, like Classmates.com, MySpace, and Friendster, that weren't doing the job," Hess said of Facebook. Finding a way for people to connect online "was a real problem, and they solved it."

Has Facebook strayed from its roots as the apex of user-friendliness? No, insists Christina Holsberry, the company's user experience manager. "Many of our designers are engineers and are the ones building some of the front-end functionality," Holsberry told CNET News. "The user experience team works very closely with them to come up with the right design. We spend time understanding user feedback and focusing on concerns, confusions, or user needs, and try to articulate the answers to, 'What are users saying and why?'"

Facebook has staved off previous user revolts by making small changes: the News Feed, for example, was scoffed at initially, its presentation criticized for being in-your-face promiscuous when it launched in the fall of 2006. A few extra privacy controls later, it's so central to the site that, ironically, when Facebook issued its latest redesign, users protested how much the News Feed had changed.

"We always run new designs by users to get their feedback, understand their concerns, and pinpoint any confusing areas," Holsberry said. "We typically bring people into our user-testing lab and observe how they use a new product, and then continuously iterate based on what we see from testing and any of our other feedback channels."

Facebook needs to be careful. Much of the Silicon Valley landgrab in the Web 2.0 boom was all about who reigned over mass content ownership: video hosting, photo sharing, blog posts, e-mail, and instant-message conversations. The sort of hunger for data and content aggregation that could make a visual design expert like Douglas Bowman feel cast aside at Google could also give off a heavy vibe that Facebook cares more about what it can pull in from users than what it can give back.

But on the flip side, an over-attention to trendy, consumer-grabbing design can be reason for caution too. That's what can make it downright impossible to assemble that new dining room table you just bought at IKEA.

SynthaSite, a San Francisco-based company that lets users build Web sites with minimal technical expertise required, has changed its name: it has ditched the corporate-sounding moniker for the more Web 2.0-ish Yola.

"The name SynthaSite has brought us to where we are today, but it won't take us where we want to go," CEO Vinny Lingham said in a release. "We're reaching a global market and need a name that is easy to say, resonates in any language, and captures the creativity and excitement that our users bring to their Web sites."

Yola, which targets individuals and small businesses, comes from the Hindi word for "hatch." It launched early last year and now says it has more than 1.5 million registered users. The name change won't affect any of them, the company said, and if their sites are hosted on SynthaSite subdomains, the URLs will not change.

While still SynthaSite, Yola launched a new user interface last summer and more recently raised a $20 million series B venture round from Reinet Fund.