I’m going to be controversial and say I like the new Facebook interface. There has been something of a backlash (see Group Students against Facebook News Feed – Official Petition to Facebook) to the new feed-style approach of communicating changes:

Primarily, this is because people feel it’s an invasion of privacy. Almost *anything* (wall comments, invitation acceptance, relationship status etc) you do on facebook is now instantly and easily viewable by others. This *had* always been public information, but before people had to go out of their way to stalk find out what had been changed.

Firstly, I would argue that if you’re not happy with people knowing who’s wall you are commenting on and so on, then you can always remove this from your own mini-feed, so you have the option to keep some privacy on what you are doing in the fb world. Secondly, if you take the perspective that fb is a utility (which is what they do), then they have only made that utility more efficient. Previously, you could see which friends had made profile changes, but have no idea what had changed, so this was as good as no information. Now, it’s communicated to you.

Finally, familiarity is comfortable, and people have been very used to the old interface (it’s been essentially the same forever). This is the first time that users will have to learn something new, which the brain inherently dislikes. It does seem like information overload, but hey, this is the first iteration of this approach and I’m sure it will improve.

Incidentally, does anyone know if fb do focus groups or beta tests for any of their new features? I imagine the feedback loop is pretty strong, but it’d be surprising if they hadn’t for a change like this.

However, despite all of the logic of the above, if students are simply not comfortable with it, then fb will have to act. Facebook prides itself on tracking online what happens offline, but perhaps it was never meant to be this easy!

ps: the fact that people are using facebook to protest against facebook indicates how much ownership members feel over the site. That is an achievement in itself.
pps: to get the alternative view, check harj’s blog here.