Since the launch of the new Facebook home page a couple of months ago, they seem to be making at least a little effort to respond to some of the complaints they've received. The following changes aren't exactly earth-shattering, but hopefully they'll solve some of the problems caused by the new interface.

Friends Page

Not surprisingly, some of the "fixes" really aren't. For example, here's a change I do not like. It used to be that when you click the Friends link in the top nav bar, you would be taken to a page that lists all your friends, which is pretty much what I wanted. However now the default page is for you to search for friends, something I do about .0005% of the time I'm on Facebook.

Now, if you want to see all your friends, you have to click the All Friends link at the top of the left-hand panel. I haven't been able to find a way to make that the default view—if you know of one, please let me know so I can share the info.

They've also moved some links that used to go across the top of the page to the left-hand nav—for example, Recently Added and Recently Updated. The latter brings up your list of friends and identifies changes they've made to their profile pages lately. I never use this, because I see these changes on my News Feed or on their Wall, but I guess some people find it a good way to quickly see which of their friends have been posting stuff lately.

Friend Lists

You may also notice some new friend lists that you didn't create, like Family and Work. I'm not sure why they think we can't make those ourselves if we want them but I guess they thought it would be helpful somehow. The names in my Family list came from people I had identified as relatives, so that makes sense. I have NO idea how they came up with the people on my Work list. It bears no resemblance to any work reality I've ever had. There's also lists of friends in the same networks as you but that may have already been there in the last iteration of the page.

They've also made it a little more obvious how to create, edit, and delete friend lists by putting the links right at the top of a list.

Home Page Filters

If you go to your home page, you'll see these new lists they've created have also been added to your list of filters in the left-hand nav. But the better change is that they've added a filter to just show Status Updates (you may have to click the More link below the links to see it), which is nice for hiding all the "Jane took the What Kind of Pasta Would You Be? quiz" and other types of updates so you can quickly scan what your friends are saying they're currently up to. AND, if you drag that link to the top of the list, it will be your default view any time you come back to your home page.

Live (-ish) Feed

One of the complaints after the redesign was that Facebook had removed the real-time News Feed capability (which was a separate tab on the home page) so now you always have to manually refresh the page to see new updates come in. So I guess this is their compromise: If you haven't refreshed your home page in a certain (unknown) amount of time, you'll suddenly get a notification to "Show X New Posts." When you click that link, those new updates appear in full.

I suspect someone has decided that actually making the feed live, where new updates appear as soon as they're posted, might be annoyiing to some people for some reason. So this way, you don't have to refresh the page yourself to know there are new entries, but you have some control over whether to show them yet or not.

Still Unchanged

Unfortunately, they haven't fixed two of the biggest losses that came with the redesign. You still can't see your own most recent status at the top of the home page (you have to go to your Profile page to see it) and you still don't get "X and Y are now friends" notices there either. Maybe some day...

Posted in Facebook, How To, Social Media, User Interface