Facebook gets redesigned | Hacker News Reader

Facebook gets redesigned

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19 pointswyldstallyn2645 comments

I hate to be one of those people constantly whinging about Facebook redesigns, but ... can someone explain why Facebook seems to intent on "curating" your stream for you, based on priorities that aren't clear? I know a lot of people probably enjoy having some definition of "highlights" stuck at top, but many of us like going through the whole thing to see what all our friends are up to, until you get to a status update you recognize, which means that you know you're done looking. What does FB lose by taking away the ability to see a simple chronological list of updates? What do they gain by foregrounding the posts that they think are important?

Edited to add: Several people replied to me saying "But some of us DON'T want to see a big chronological list!" Well, yeah, I said in my original post that I realized this. And in fact you already had the option to see only "Top news" instead of "All posts." What bugs me is the one-size-fits-all version that has now been imposed on everybody. Why is FB allergic to allowing different users to interact with their data in the way those users want?

My interpretation is that Facebook is more valuable if the content you see when you interact with it is more useful to you. Facebook is about connecting you with family and friends, and that's easier to do if you see valuable content more frequently than low-value content (which might pop up in a simple chronological stream).

I think this way they're trying to improve the "keep-alive" of relationships between you and people on your friend lists by showing you more valuable content, which in turn will lead to higher engagement (eg. likes/comments/etc), which in turns keeps relationships going through interactions, which in turn keeps you coming back to Facebook. And that obviously is a good thing for Facebook.

The problem is people with many hundreds or thousands of friends. At that point, your feed gets too unwieldy to read chronologically, or it might scroll by so quickly that in the time you catch up, dozens more have been fed in at the top. Facebook is trying to just show you what they think you're interested in the most. Sadly, they aren't doing a great job of it. I agree that they should at bring back the "Most Recent" feed for those of us who have a manageable friend count.

Because 'going through the whole thing' is nearly impossible for some people, who either log on spargingly or have a lot of friends. Additionally, since Facebook is full of relationships that are less than actual 'friends', a lot of people have complained for years about the quality of the posts. I think they must have realized their algorithms needed a stronger signal than what they had, and this UI is a way to get that data.

But this option already existed (you could choose "top stories" instead of "latest stories"). What annoys me is imposing a one-size-fits-all version on everybody.

I often wonder the opposite: why do FB users care about seeing the updates of just anyone in their friend list?

But I'm thinking along the lines of a more cynical user, as in, I realize FB is a huge timesuck, I've probably friended more people than I consider friends in real life, I should get off the computer more, etc etc., and so I appreciate the way that FB shows me the updates of people who I'm most interested in.

Does it bother me that I don't know the criteria? Not really, in the same way that I'm not bothered that I don't know the details of PageRank. But I'm guessing FB makes its judgment based on how much I chat with a certain person, interact with their updates and walls, and browse/stalk their profile. If that's the case, their "Top Updates" has been right on the mark.

I end up spending less time than I have to to see the "news" that I'm most interested in. If I log onto FB later and see that the Top UPdates largely remain the same, then I am satisfied to log back out for the day. At the same time, I'm more engaged with Facebook as a user because I'm always seeing things that I care about, even if some of them are half a day old. Strangely, this curation saves me time from FB yet fulfills FB's mission to keep me on its site, as I'd be less enthusiastic in coming back of 7 out of 10 items in my default news feed were drek.

And yes, you can say that I should maintain my friend list better and silence/unfriend the users that I don't care about...but if FB does a good job of that (the silencing part) without me needing to go through another options menu, I don't have any complaints.

why do FB users care about seeing the updates of just anyone in their friend list?

If the things they're saying aren't (regularly) of value, they wouldn't be on my list.

In an ideal world, yes. But I suspect even the most particular Facebook users have FB-friended people who turn out to have a much more annoying online persona, i.e. anyone who hasn't grokked what oversharing on the Internet means.

In cases where de-friending a person has no real-life consequences (i.e. they're not a close friend, either in proximity or emotionally), then FB's curation saves you a little of that tedious cleanup. In cases where it is awkward to defriend someone because you have a real-life connection to them, the curation may save you from having to manually silence their updates.

I can only think of one case where I had to manually perform these silencing actions, and it was with a friend who is a good real life friend and who I communicate on FB regularly, but who has decided to make his wall a constant stream of his political beliefs. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with the convenience that FB's curation performs in auto-ignoring the people that I tend to ignore (but not necessarily dislike).

There's one more important aspect to this. Sometimes, a FB friend who isn't normally in your Top feed will appear because something he/she posted has gotten a lot of activity/likes. This is not so dissimilar to a place like HN, where the well-liked submissions of people I've never met are prominently visible to me. This kind of social aggregation would not happen in a situation where you've decided to shut out all people that you've decided a priori have and will have nothing of interest to you.

What do they gain by foregrounding the posts that they think are important?

Control. Facebook is free, so it IS NOT FOR YOU. It's for advertisers. The fact that there is little advertising on FB at the moment does not disprove this. Wait until the Super Bowl or the US Presidential election next year.

It's the long game.

UPD: Ah, the silent downvote.

As opposed to previous minor redesigns, this time Facebook has complete lost it.

Basically what you're missing out on is "subscribing" to non-friends a-la-Twitter, horrible page layouts, numerous bugs, and way too many options and configurations.

No Facebook, I do not want to manage my friends as if this is some kind of war room. Stop it.

And someone please let Zuck know that we're not in 1999 anymore. Floating frames and detached sidebars are a UX abomination.

Facebook is panicking and shooting in every direction.

I don't think so. I think they're backgrounding (side-bar'ing) random friend activity and designating the center stream for capital-c Content. Subscriptions, active threads, messaging from Like'd entities...the center box is commerce-oriented, the sidebar is for communications and for contributing to entities (comments, photos, statuses, etc.) defined as candidates for the center stream.

I believe that the center stream will be where the half-page forced-Chevrolet ad is going to go, the changes of late all point in this direction. Think: monetization and profit.

Along those same lines, I'd bet that the floating section was added to get more eyeballs looking on the right side of the screen where the ads are.

I'd say that along those lines, one aspect of the purpose of the sections is that the center is long-form attention and the right sidebar is short-form "constant check" attention.

And just to put the button on it: I fully believe that FB is at least this cynical when it comes to the design of the page.

As someone else has already replied, this layout minimizes the managing of friends, at least in terms of prioritizing who you want to see most of. The curation seems to be based on how much you interact with another user. By definition, your best friends on FB are the ones you interact with most, or at least whose profiles you peruse the most often. And so with FB's curation algorithm, you don't have to generate a best friends list.

I hate to jump on a hater bandwagon, because I genuinely am a proponent of innovation, but: really?

I think part of the usage of a web product should be to put you in a state of ease and enjoyment, not anxiety. The new FB puts me in an anxious state. I feel I'm always on the verge of missing something.

Twitter I feel has balanced the checking-in anxiety issue with a compelling product experience, and I always felt that Facebook allowed me to maneuver through the information flow at a pace I wanted.

Now, I'm presented with a realtime feed and a curated feed within the same context. I just get an anxious feeling looking at it.

I think the technology is amazing behind it. To be able to do realtime information flow and processing on this scale is astounding. But I think product developers need to focus not only one the technology that drives the user experience, but the emotion they are trying to instill on the users.

I retract my views in light of Timeline.

For those who are not lucky enough (ha!) to enjoy the new design, here's a small glimpse: https://img.skitch.com/20110921-rfae5d2pera2ig7ugbupd4pf61.j...

It is mind-jarringly chaotic on my Home screen. Not wise.

Oh my. My eyes don't know where to go.

These new changes have made Facebook an unbearable platform for application developers. Firing ajax requests in a constant and fast pace is making the platform unmanageable. Combined with buggy and incomplete apis debugging and managing canvas apps are nearly impossible. I really hate building applications for the platform now.

I've had this for a couple of weeks (weirdly). You never get used to it and you always feel like you're missing something.

Even more annoying is the little status updates in the top right, above the sidebar showing everyone of your friends recent activity (which I really liked) seems to have gone now.

You never get used to it and you always feel like you're missing something.

I'll bet this is explicitly intentional as a driver to spend more time on Facebook.

Yes, and the changes have pretty much ruined the iOS app's "news" display.

Facebook users, your Homer Car™ is ready for you.

It feels like signing into AOL back in 1998!

They took away the ability to show all events in chronological order? Ugh. I was trying to stay away from G+ for ethical reasons, but this... This might just drive me back.

I'm very curious about the differences you think exist between the two services regarding ethics.

It's the whole Real Name debacle. It's been debated to death, though.

Facebook actually has the same policy.

Again, when Facebook bans someone, it doesn't destroy the rest of their online identity. And before you quote Google's policy on it, best do a search on the web for how it was actually handled.

My comment isn't defending Google. I'm pointing out to you that by your standard, both companies are unethical, and there is really no reason to trust either. Just in case you didn't know Facebook's stance on real names...

You have never heard me claim that Facebook was ethical.

Not only that, but Tweetdeck seems to just be throwing random updates my way.

They could at least leave the API as is...

With only ~300 friends, it seems sort of pointless to curate my feed into 'Top Stories'. Over the course of a day, there are only a couple of things that get my friends commenting or clicking 'like', and they don't get lost because there is no noise.

It's as if Facebook thinks we're all Power Users (TM) with 1,000+ friends who cannot possibly keep up with the demands of 'real-time' updates.

The thing that scares me most about this redesign is that Facebook is spending resources making half baked UX changes instead of focusing energy into doing something new an innovative.

Lists might have their place in the future, and somehow users might get used to a more cluttered design. Ultimately, these types of features are tweaks on a product and not a game changer.

Each redesign they do lately seems to bring them closer to the look & feel of myspace.

wtf are they thinking?

Oh god. This is horrifying. Less is more facebook.. less is more. I agree with the people complaining about facebooks need to curate things for you. Thats what the "hide posts from this person" should be used for. Just give me one stream and let me decide what filters to put on it.

I'm not one of the lucky few who gets to see it, unfortunately.

Thus... Screenshots pl0x.

http://cl.ly/AJp0

Having a 27" screen, I don't mind it. The only things that bug me is the triangle at the top of each post, and your profile pic up in the header (which now floats)

It's such a shame. G+ has so much potential but unless everyone joins the game it won't succeed. Facebook really has a TERRIBLE User Experience compared to G+ Let's hope it won't end in a new Bing vs. Google situation

Agree. I see a ghost town in G+ and see a big city in Facebook with all their traffics and unmanage bugs. Facebook just copied the G+ features, but could not copy the concept behind it. I hope both Facebook and G+ success and find their own market.

The right-hand bar feels very "app" like. I wonder if their intention is to transition, through many iterations, Facebook into more of an "app-like" design and less of a "website"?

This is why I still enjoy using FriendFeed. No fuss no confusions. A working social environment.

Still rolling out apparently, I'm not getting the redesigned facebook.

Count yourself lucky, it's like twitter, Facebook and google+ mixed into a dirty stew.

Clutter++

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