The Social

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."

That was quick.

In a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has acknowledged that the company left quite a few users rather miffed when it opted to stop displaying @-replies (conversational "tweets" directed to another Twitter user) in members' feeds, if they didn't already follow the recipient of the reply.

"Folks loved this feature because it allowed them to discover new people and participate serendipitously in various conversations," Stone wrote. "The problem with the setting was that it didn't scale, and even if we rebuilt it, the feature was blunt. It was confusing and caused a sense of inconsistency. We felt we could do much better."

So what are they doing? For now, Twitter's team is bringing the feature back in a limited form (you'll see all @-replies, except for ones created using the "reply" button in Twitter's interface, which is a tad convoluted), and they're working on its successor.

"We've started designing a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow," Stone wrote. "This will be a per-user setting, and it will take a bit longer to put together, but not too long, and we're already working on it."

You may now return to your regularly scheduled 140-character-long programming--right?

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.

So there's a new Facebook app out there, designed to poll users on the social network's latest redesign. The results? Hundreds of thousands have responded. 94 percent give it a thumbs-down. Ouch.

Comments range from "WHY FIX IT, WHEN IT WASN'T BROKE, you will be SORRYYYYYYYYYYY" to "It feels counterintuitive and less technologically advanced than the last layout."

Now, this is clearly not an official vote. Chances are, you're not going to install a third-party polling application with the sole purpose of voicing an opinion on the new Facebook design unless you're really opinionated about it. So the 94 percent might be kind of high.

But still. Facebook is so big now--over 175 million members--that even an interface change may throw many of the less technical users completely off guard. And from what we've heard, non-geeks really do find the new design more difficult to use. The new site, particularly the activity feeds on member profiles, really do look different. The blurring between status messages and wall posts doesn't make much sense in my opinion--though I do like the improved news feed filtering tools.

It's easy to wave this off, because Facebook redesigns have brought up one threatened user revolt after another, and the site has just kept on growing. Members grew used to the new features, and in some cases (like the original launch of the news feed) it's hard to imagine Facebook without them. The only changes Facebook has made in response to user outrage, historically, have been in response to privacy concerns.

But Facebook's not just dealing with the young and tech-savvy anymore. When the people who freak out over a redesigned phone bill or cable channel-changing menu have Facebook profiles, "they'll get used to it" doesn't float as well. So this could really be a problem.

The new layout is a forward-thinking one, inspired by streaming content services like Twitter. Executives from Facebook have said that they see "the stream" as the next evolution of how we interact on the Web.

But even though Twitter's all over daytime talk shows these days, it's still just barely out of the gates as something more than an early-adopter toy. It's a fraction the size of Facebook. And the "Twitter plus media sharing" model doesn't have the best track record, as its most notable example, Pownce, was sold to Six Apart and shut down amid dwindling traffic. It probably would've been smarter for Facebook to ease users into the "stream" with a course of smaller tweaks rather than to require them to plunge in headlong.

Facebook's last redesign was finalized in September. That's only six months ago. If a site is putting out changes every six months that a mainstream audience sees as drastic, they could get fed up with it fast.

(Credit: Facebook)

Along with its nifty new iPhone application, Facebook on Monday night unveiled a new home page. No, not the moderately infamous "redesign" of its member pages--this is a new look for the page that you see when you navigate to Facebook.com without being logged in. It's what you'll see if you're not yet a member.

There's a pretty new blue gradient background, sure, and it makes the whole page look a little bit less stuffy. But more importantly, there's a map of the world with little Facebook "head" icons scattered about the globe connected by hash mark lines.

The term "social utility," one of founder Mark Zuckerberg's preferred phrases, is gone from the home page, replaced by the more Zen-like description of the social network: "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life."

The map is significant. Facebook wants to be a global power, arguably in a way that not even Google is--look at the difficulty that Page, Brin, & co. have had dealing with regional rivals like China's Baidu. At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March, Zuckerberg talked about how young people in war-torn regions of the Middle East were using Facebook to communicate and broaden their horizons.

More than half of Facebook's 100-million-plus users are outside the United States now, which means that the social network may be well on its way toward achieving global domination over its regional rivals.

On a more speculative note, the fact that this new, map-adorned home page was released in conjunction with a new iPhone application is interesting. The iPhone 3G is GPS-enabled, and some have speculated that real-time location sharing of some sort may be on the way for Facebook.

There are a handful of start-ups that already have location-aware services, and consumers have been reluctant to adopt them; Loopt, Whrrl, and Brightkite haven't exploded the way some expected they would after they released iPhone 3G applications.

If Facebook made a move in the space, though, things could be different. Because, goodness knows, millions of Facebook users don't seem to have any qualms about sharing everything else about themselves on the Web.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has caught on to the fact that a sizeable handful of his 100-million-plus users say they aren't too thrilled with the site's new redesign. But he won't change anything, as Facebook occasionally has in the face of user revolt.

A post on the company blog, authored by Zuckerberg, wrote that the site's new focus--which emphasizes the sharing of media and information--is "an important step for us."

"In the last four years, we've built new products that help people share more, such as photos, videos, groups, events, wall posts, status updates and so on," the post read. "As people share more, sometimes we need to change the site to accommodate how much information people are posting."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Some Facebook users freaked out over its News Feed in 2006, and its Beacon advertising program last year. But the concerns voiced there dealt with privacy, not user interface. That was something that could've resulted in much more PR damage than a design that a slim percentage of users vehemently dislike (and which most, it seems, don't really care much about).

"Many people disliked News Feed at first because it changed their home page and how they shared information," Zuckerberg's post read. ("How they share information" is putting it lightly.) "Now it's one of the most important parts of Facebook. We think the new design can have the same effect." He added the company had gone through months of a "feedback" stage and that the final product was shaped largely in part by users' input.

In response to some Facebook users who asked if they could have the option to use the old design instead of the new one, Zuckerberg said it wasn't possible for technical reasons. "It's tempting to say that we should just support both designs, but this isn't as simple as it sounds," he wrote. "Supporting two versions is a huge amount of work for our small team, and it would mean that going forward we would have to build everything twice. If we did that then neither version would get our full attention."

Facebook's team isn't exactly tiny--they have said they hope to hit 800 employees by the end of 2008--but running two Web sites that run the same property differently probably is a pain in the neck. Kind of analogous to Microsoft's dealing with those holdouts who are still using Windows 98.

And as for the members who have banded together to form Facebook groups protesting the new design (a bit meta, yes), Zuckerberg claims he's not offended. "We appreciate the thousands of you who have written in to give us feedback," the post read. "Even if you're joining a group to express things you don't like about the new design, you're giving us important feedback and you're sharing your voice, which is what Facebook is all about."