The Ever-changing Face of the Book

It seems that recently Facebook had a bit of a facelift, no pun intended! The reactions to these changes have seem to be largely negative. It seems that most users did not want Facebook to change, and were in fact quite happy with the previous design.

So why the change, well by and large it seems as though the makers of "the book" are on a quest to conquer all the known universe of social computing. Having seemingly trumped it's most recognizable competitor myspace, the most recent upgrades seem to push the social networking giant, now the most popular in the world according Compete, towards the goal of drawing more users from what was until now a very different service; twitter. The updates have essentially changed the facebook layout into something similar to a twitter feed. Well ok the two are not exactly the same, twitter still maintains its uniqueness, but the general concept seems to be moving towards creating a veritable competitor it.

Now what's the problem with this you ask? Well conceptually alone nothing, the problem is rather the implementation. It seems that in it's efforts to do to conquer the world of social interaction, Facebook becoming more or less a collection of sites sites, rather than a single entity. In this collection we see, as mentioned aforehand, tittwer (the homepage), myspace (the profile page), flickr (the photos page), youtube (the videos page), blogspot (the notes page) and of course the boxes page, which seems to have become a spot to place anything that does not fit into the above categories. This attempt to encompass all is the largest problem facing "the book", as by continually adding more features it slowly leading to an online world that which is so large that the user becomes lost trying to find what was once just a click away.

Todays facebook is a farcry from the original release way back in 2006, but given the piling clutter it is important to remember that it was these innovations combined with constant change and direct assaults on it's competiors that led Facebook to be as popular as it is today. Certainly myspace was once the king of social networking, but it made the mistake of doing what Facebook didn't; sitting on old designs to long and not innovating. The fact is that constant change is needed to stay a live in the online market, however it is important to ensure a clean transition into the future that to maintain an interface that preforms well and avoids diverging too far from what users require.