I was doing some phone mentoring the other day about social media and I realized that there are so many useful features in Facebook, but a lot of people simply don't have time to look for them. So I'm going to devote this entire week to the site. Today and tomorrow I'll discuss the changes to the home page and for the rest of the days, I'll cover a variety of topics, including privacy controls, friend lists, and synching FB with your other social networks. If you have any specific questions you'd like answered, please send them to me and, if I can't address them this week, I'll do so as soon as possible.

Well. It looks like Mark Zuckerberg and his band of wacky Facebook developers have done it again. A mere 8 months after the last redesign of the site—one which launched a level of wrath not seen since the introduction of New Coke—they decided it would be a good idea to force their users to learn an entirely new system of navigating their home page.

It seems like the motivating factor was the rise in popularity of Twitter, and they wanted Facebook to work more like it. Which is really bizarre to me, because I don't see the two sites as being at all similar. But I digress...

Regardless of whether we love or hate the new design (or something in between), it would appear we're stuck with it according to this response in the new home page FAQ.

Q: How can I return to the old home page?
A: The old version of the site is no longer available. Facebook launched the new site design to simplify the user experience and to make it easier for you to share and interact.

Yeah, nothing simplifies a user experience like completely changing an interface that people have finally gotten used to. Sigh.

This post is going to walk you through some of the main changes and provide some tips on how to work with them. The good news is they're not all bad. The bad news is, the bad ones are REALLY bad.

The single most egregious change...

You've probably already noticed that the status line box has changed so it no longer says your name at the top but, instead, says What's On Your Mind?

I've seen that this has perturbed a number of users because they're no longer sure if they're supposed to post in the third person or because they think it's a bit of a deep question. For me, this is not a big problem and I think people will get used to this pretty quickly because it is like Twitter, where you can write anything you want, not just something that starts with your name. (Note that whatever you write, it will still display with your name in front of it.)

HOWEVER, what is dumb, is that FB no longer displays what you've written here just above it. So the only way you have of knowing what you wrote here previously is to scroll through all the updates until you find your last status post, which could be screens and screens later. I'm willing to bet that FB will be fixing this in the very near future, because it's such an obvious loss.

The good thing about the new status line: The Publisher

Previously, you had to go to a separate page to post links, photos, videos, etc. Now you can do it right on your home page, from the links under the status line box. FB refers to this single spot for posting all info as the Publisher and it also appears at the top of your Profile page.

But where are the links to those extra functions you may ask? That would be a fair question because, to access them, you have to click on the words What's On Your Mind?, which is about as unintuitive as I could possibly think of.

Depending which link you click, a different section will open up below it. For example, here are what the Links and Photos options look like.

And again, depending on which option you choose, there will be different actions available. For example, if you want to add a link, enter the URL in the box and click Attach to see the preview. Then click Share to post it.

Note: At any time, you can collapse this section by clicking on the X.

The new News Feed

The other main change to the home page is what appears in your news feed, the section with the list of items that tells you what your friends have been up to. Previously, this feed would show a subset of your friends' activities (which ones appeared would frequently change) and they only appeared some time after they actually happened. Now, the feed has every single activity of all your friends—updating their status lines, posting photos and links, joining groups—and they appear as soon as they happen.

The good part of this is you'll see everything your friends are doing. The bad part is you'll see everything your friends are doing. :)

Let's face it. There are lots of updates that are, let's say, less then fascinating. There was a time when you could tell FB that you wanted to see more status lines and fewer photos, for example, but I'm not sure if that had already gone away with the previous redesign (it's just so hard to keep up!).

FB has implemented a couple of ways to help you manage this onslaught of info. The first is that you can simply hide updates from specific friends.

Hiding and unhiding friends from your news feed

Update 04/06/09: Since I wrote this post, Facebook has made some minor changes to the home page. In this case, it's primarily terminology, so I've marked the differences here as well.

To hide a friend's updates, mouse over the top right area of one of their current posts and an X will appear with a tool tip a button will appear that says Hide [PERSON]. Note: If you click this, ALL updates from that person will be hidden—not just that individual one. Also note that if in the previous version of FB you had ever selected Show Less of a person's updates, those people will now appear in your Hidden list.

If later you want to see that person's activities again, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on See Hidden Friends Edit Options. A box will pop up with the list of all the people whose updates you've hidden and you can add them back to the feed. (There have been a number of bugs reported with this so, if you have any problems unhiding someone, check this post for possible solutions.)

Note: If you click Show [#] Hidden Posts, previously hidden posts will reappear in the feed, but the people who posted them will remain Hidden, so future posts won't appear unless you take them off the list altogether.

Whew! I think that's enough for one day. Tomorrow I'll cover the other way to choose which posts to see in your news feed, which is by using the filters in the left-hand column, as well as some other features of the new design. In the meantime, if you have any specific questions about the new home page, send me an e-mail.

Posted in Facebook,How To,My Two Cents,User Interface