Facebook gets a face lift

Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Facebook gets a face lift

by Jordan Running Sep 5th 2006

Last night social networking heavy hitter Facebook got a significant update in the form of the News Feed. The News Feed is a sort of dashboard that consolidates all of the recent updates relevant to you, e.g. your friends' profile changes, new members of your groups, new events, photos, and so on. Though I'm disappointed that there's no actual feed in the RSS/Atom sense, I am pretty impressed with the interface. Each category has a unique icon, e.g. a heart (or broken heart) for relationship status changes, a calendar icon for events, a flag for political issues, and so on. It also puts the full text of wall posts and thumbnails of photos right there in the feed. In addition to the News Feed, every user's profile now features a Mini-Feed which shows all of their recent activity.

The News Feed basically condenses all the day-to-day information that Facebook power-users would have spent a lot of time clicking around for into a single page, which is essentially the opposite of what MySpace does. MySpace takes advantage of poor design and endless clicks to maximize pageviews at the expense of usability. Facebook seems to have taken a stand against that sort of pageview inflation and made user convenience its first priority. Sorry for hating on MySpace, but it's really refreshing to see someone else do it right.

Tags: college, facebook, minifeed, myspace, newsfeed, socialnetworking, socialsoftware

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Christopher Higgins said 10:33AM on 9-05-2006

This new development disturbs me. It reflects the influence that MySpace has on all social networking sites...Facebook just took it to another level. This promotes stalking; EVERYTHING you do is out there for your friends to see, even the ones you added a year ago and forgot to delete after losing touch.

I don't like it.

Jordan Running said 10:41AM on 9-05-2006

I can certainly relate to your privacy concerns, Christoper, but as I understand it Facebook's News Feeds respect users' privacy settings, which means that any information shown in someone's News Feed was already available to that person elsewhere on the site.

The lesson to be learned here is as old as the web itself: If you don't want people to see it, don't put it online.

Christopher Higgins said 11:19AM on 9-05-2006

Yes, but not everybody observes those privacy settings. I myself only recently modified my privacy settings (and I don't even remember what I did). I hardly think that the majority of Facebook users (especially the high schoolers) are going to be concerned about privacy (or even know that you can set your privacy on it.)

Bennington Purcell said 12:05PM on 9-05-2006

AHH!!! Stalker Heaven. This is the begining of the end. I am a dedicated facebook member but this Big Brother has to go. People now seem to enjoy having their daily life tracked by everyone and their parents and employeers. Creepy.

matt said 1:05PM on 9-05-2006

Yea, just a little wierd. It's kind of a cool feature, but now everyone can see anything that you do on facebook. Not that anything really important happens there anyways...

Nicholas Bell said 7:39PM on 9-07-2006

Everyone can't see your information if you change your privacy settings. It's not that difficult of a concept.

You'd think college students would be smart enough to figure out privacy settings. It's a pretty visible link.

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