Jerry Brito

The problem with the new Facebook isn’t the graphic design, it’s the change in perspective. In this article, Farhad Manjoo explains the Twitterization of Facebook:

In the past, Facebook used a complex algorithm to round up your friends’ recently added photos, notes, and status updates and compile them into a neat summary on your front page. … Now, instead of a summary of what your friends have been up to in the last few hours, you get what Zuckerberg calls a “stream”—a continuously updated timeline that shows every little thing that someone in your network does. Every time you refresh the front page, there’s new stuff for you to read. Much of it isn’t very interesting, and because the stream moves so quickly, the little that is interesting gets drowned out by items that aren’t. The effect is like being at a party where you can’t choose whom to mingle with—you’re forced to listen to everyone’s conversations, which is almost as useless as listening to no one’s.

The reason this works on Twitter is that you choose who you follow. I, for one, only follow people I care about or find interesting, so every little update from them is more or less interesting to me.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t necessarily follow on Twitter everyone who is my friend on Facebook. So, it’s like you signed up for a Twitter account that already had you following hundreds of people, whether you find them interesting or not. The onus is now on you to cull the drones by clicking the “X” next to their name.

I agree with Manjoo that people will get over this, but Facebook is certainly making a big paradigm shift mid-stream to keep up with the Twitters. Things would have been easier if they had been successful in buying Twitter.