1. First and foremost, it is trying to be the newest social networking fad – Twitter. There’s just one problem though – social networking websites can’t rip off other ones without having design compromises. For Facebook, the new homepage design is terrible by all accounts as useful links like Events and Groups have all but disappeared (or just had less space than before) in favour of a centralised live feed and a ‘highlights’ column which is absolutely pointless.
2. Clutter. The last version of Facebook wasn’t without its flaws but it wasn’t as messed up as this one. The homepage is now a complete and utter headscramble of status updates mixed up with big, shouty application updates on the ones that you don’t even use (I don’t bother with the applications – they’re just pointless and even more so when the last design update just pushed them all aside onto a graveyard page).
3. On the profile pages you now have a choice of showing stuff from – and this is assuming that Person A is a hypothetical person of me – Person A + Friends, Just Person A, and Just Friends. What’s the bloody point?
Facebook, as a social networking site, is useful for me in the sense that I can catchup with friends from sixth form and university effectively. Because of this, I have to endure a terrible, clumsily designed website. If I had no ‘friends’, there is nothing on this God-forsaken planet that would make me sign up.
