The New Facebook Changes and What They Mean
To the non-corporate user (IE, most of us) the most noticeable changes will come in the form of the visuals. Both the Facebook “homepage” and corporate pages are changing to become more personable. Now those pages that you are a fan of will look less corporate and more like your buddy. Also good news for you super friendly types, no more cap on 5000 friends.
The new Facebook Home page
The new “Pages to Profiles” shift allows is supposed to make it easier to interact with with those things you become a “fan” of. It seems to be what Facebook is attempting to do is to go after the music crowd hanging around MySpace. It’s really the way it should have been done in the beginning. I’m always a big fan of K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid) and it really did not make sense for Facebook to differentiate between company pages and friend profiles. Now that’s been fixed.
What’s Facebook going for here?
Facebook wants to incorporate all the good parts of other social networking sites and leave out the bad. Now it’s worried about Twitter. The microblogging site that is capturing congress and media attention has also caught the eye of Facebook. It wants to be your real time friend connection and has looked long and hard at the Twitter model. They hope to take some of that Twitter audience with the updates to the home page. One way that they have attempted to attack the Twitter paradigm is to make the home page update in real time. It’s also added new sorting features to help users sort through the clutter, something Twitter doesn’t do.
If Twitter is watching this, they should really be concerned. I like the simpleness of Twitter but there are some things that it could better do. It seems the real thing that hinders them is servers. We’ve all seen the twitter fail whale. Twitter should be updating pages to be live using an AJAX page or something similar. Although a lot of twitter apps already do this, can Twitter’s servers handle it if the web page does?
The new home page should be going live according to Facebook. Although the changes are impressive, it still leaves me questioning their profit model… are rather, do they have one? It’s hard to be too critical, what I see Zuckerberg & Co. doing is laying the foundation for possibly one of the greatest connection platforms since email. With that amount of connectivity Facebook is bound to capitalize on the interaction but for right now they seem to be playing it cool and getting people in without cost prohibitive fees. Smart move.
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