I'd been reading various snippets about the latest redesign from my friends and on industry blogs but still wasn't really sure what to expect. So when I finally got it yesterday, my first thought was that it didn't seem too bad.

And then I discovered that neither news feed view—Top News nor Most Recent—was displaying all the posts from my friends. In fact, Most Recent (the new name for the previous Live Feed) seemed even more behind than Top News (formerly News Feed). Bad.

Fortunately, today it seems like that was a temporary bug, because my Live Feed appears to be current, but it really does make me wonder if Facebook tests anything before they roll it out—this wasn't exactly a hidden flaw. Now that things seem to be working the way they're supposed to, here are my thoughts on whether that's a good thing or not. :)

The Feeds
As mentioned above, they changed the names of the two different views of the feeds. In the case of Top News, I'm not sure that's much of an improvement, because there's still no apparent rhyme or reason to what makes the cut and, when the most recent post showing is from 4 hours ago, it doesn't seem to be all that newsy. From a functional point of view, one thing that seems to have changed is that this view now includes some of the auto-generated items, like X became a friend of Y and A joined group B. I don't see this as being much of a plus; however, if they're kept to a minimum, they're not as distracting as they are in the other view. In general, much like last time, I see absolutely no value to this view until they provide some mechanism for users to set what kind of information they consider to be of most interest to them. Because Facebook's algorithm doesn't seem to be aligned at all with my brain's.

For the other view, I think it's good they no longer refer to it as a Live Feed since it was never live to begin with. Otherwise, I'm not seeing any real change one way or the other.

Without any major improvements in this area, I think I'll stick with Facebook Lite as my default interface for now and just switch back when I need to post a link or play Lexulous. Unfortunately, they took away one of my favorite things about the Lite version (the way they handled notifications) but that happened a little while back, so I have no idea what the driver was for that change.

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Update: As of April 20, 2010, Facebook Lite is no more. Sigh.

http://www.facebook.com/facebook?v=wall&story_fbid=110629035639137

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Update: After the previous redesign, a lot of people discovered that posts by many of their friends weren't showing up on their home pages. It turned out that Facebook had set it so that only 250 people's posts would be published (and they decided randomly who those 250 people would be). Apparently it's happening to people again but, fortunately, the fix is pretty straightforward.

Go to your home page and make sure you're on the Most Recent view, then scroll down to the bottom of the page. You'll see an Edit Options link and, when you click it, a window pops up that lets you change the number. Change it to 5,000, which is the maximum number of friends Facebook allows.

I didn't mention it above because I had made the change last time and it had "stuck" through this design, so I thought that it would for everyone. Apparently not...

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The Messages Area
Other than the questionable design choice of putting dark blue icons against a slightly less dark blue background, I'm not seeing any big change in terms of functionality with this new area of the interface. They've moved the Notifications alert from the bottom right of the screen to the top left, next to the Inbox and Friends Request alerts, which does seem to make sense. But it's not enough for me to scream "Huzzah!" or anything.

The Left-Hand Nav Area
This seems to be where they've done the most damage. It used to be a list of filters that I could use to quickly see different types of posts, like Status Updates or Links, and posts from different friend lists I had created. Now I have to click the Friends link to see my lists (and click More to see all of them) and some types of filters (Links, Notes) have moved below the More link under the Applications area. You also don't seem to be able to reorder any of these links anymore, which is a definite loss.

The other thing that I don't like about the new Friends link is that, when you click it, you don't actually see a list of all your friends, which would seem like the most logical thing to me. Instead, this page seems more designed to help you add more friends, which is not something I actually spend time thinking about—it seems to happen fairly naturally. If you do want to see all your friends now, go to Account > Edit Friends and click on the Friends button on the left-hand side, or simply go to http://www.facebook.com/friends/#!/friends/?filter=afp.

I took one look at the Applications "dashboard" and realized that would probably be the last time I ever looked at it again. There's absolutely nothing on that page that provides me with any useful information whatsoever. I'd be curious if anyone else finds it useful—if so, please let me know if I'm missing something obvious. Note that if you actually want to manage your Applications at all, you'll need to go to Account > Application Settings.

I don't use Facebook Chat at all so have no opinion on any changes related to it.

There are a few other changes to the site but nothing that jumps out at me as being particularly useful or awful. On the whole, I'm not seeing any real advantages to the new design and, given how much people generally dislike change, I really have to wonder what the behind-the-scenes motivation was for them to do this a mere three months since the last major change. Whatever it was, I'll reiterate my wish that they'll finally take a break from the incessant fixing of what ain't broke and start focusing on some of the things that are.

For more information about these changes, check out the following Facebook pages.

Blog Post: Introducing Your New Navigation

Help Center: New Home Page

And if you have any questions about the changes that I haven't addressed above, please send them along.

Posted in Facebook, My Two Cents, Social Media, User Interface