16 février 2010 | Par Isabelle Dupuis
The NEW Facebook, again!
Why is it so hard to react positively to change when we know for a fact that the web is an ever-changing environment?
For the last couple days we have opened our Facebook accounts to find out that the interface changed again to what has been commonly called the New Facebook. For the better? Well, I think so. Yes, certain things are not in the place where we were used to, but they were moved in strategic places. Like the top bar of navigation now including Friend Requests, Messages and Notification as well as the usual Home, Profile and Account (use to be settings). We must also respect that Facebook has a tonne of people ‘giving’ them information on a daily basis by simply using their accounts. That being said, we then can assume that most changes in the new Facebook are done with the proper reasoning (I hope I’m not giving them too much credit). I won’t go into detail on all the new stuff since that would make this a really long post and well, I’m not done checking it all out…
My personal favorite is the first menu on the left hand side of the page including news feed, messages, events, photos and friends. I find it easy to use and it doesn’t take up too much real estate on the page. If we click on either of the categories, the content that comes up in the middle of the page is organized!
We finally see the Recent (previously named live news???) and Top news. The content is easy to choose and view. The Inbox is as simple as before which is good news. The Events is organized by events of the week, friend’s events and they also included the birthdays. This can be very useful to see which birthdays are coming up this month or the next… The Photos, by default, display the last ones uploaded. We can view the same type organization with the friend statuses or videos which gives us some interesting ways to view what happened in the last days of our account without having to scroll down and down and down the news feed. Basically we can check each category and know with a quick glance what’s been going on.
So let’s be honest, it’s been a week since I have the new Facebook and I already forgot what the old Facebook looked like!
Catégorie(s) : Optimisation
8 commentaires
Tu avais une conversation « chat » à 3:00 PM! C’est dans les heures de travail ça! hihihi. Blague à part, j’aime bien cet article. Je ne comprenais pas non plus pourquoi les gens se plaignaient autant du nouveau facebook. Chaque fois qu’il y a eu des changements, les mêmes gens passaient leurs temps à critiquer. Pourtant, si l’on compare à la version 1.0, le réseau a beaucoup évolué et les fonctionnalités sont bien plus intéressantes. Est-ce qu’on parie qu’à la prochaine mise à jour, les mêmes gens vont passer un commentaire défavorable à la nouvelle version? :) Bonne journée.
:P eh oui! msn était ouvert mais au moins on peut dire que j’ai utilisé mon précieux temps pour éduquer hehehe En passant ton site est vraiment intéressant! Bonne journée à toi aussi.
Is ALL change good? The obvious answer to that question is no. One has to carefully weigh the pros and the cons of a change to tell. Is the last Facebook change good? I believe that is still quite unclear. And that lack of clarity comes from the immense numbers of definitions you can make of the Facebook service. With 400 million users worldwide, Facebook is a lot of things to a lot of different people. It introduced us to the concept of the status, a little snippet of text that lets us know what’s up with our friends and that allowed it to grow a lot. It grew exponentially when the apps were introduced making it an immense repository of games, quizzes, calendars and the like. Now, as far as statuses are concerned, Facebook is losing ground to streamlined versions of the service like Twitter so it chose to counter-attack by putting more on our landing page so we can get more, faster and get out. But in doing so, it also tackled the apps in a corner. Gone are the bookmarks at the bottom of the page that allowed us to switch from one app to the next. Gone is the option to rearrange the order of our apps on our landing page. Facebook is basically shooting third-party developers in the foot with that decision and that’s not good for anyone. Unless changes are made and soon, app usage will drop and with that revenue from ads and with that third-party development and with that apps in general. With less apps, there will be less users showing up daily to update their farms and mafias. Without other changes, I can guarantee a drop in Facebook usage. It is notoriously hard to cancel your membership so the user base will continue to grow but I’m sure we will see a dramatic decline in page clicks (if those numbers are available to anyone).
Not to start a debate but I have to disagree. I really hope that Facebook, having access to millions of users (a large percentage still active), is making changes by following a certain strategy based on the ridiculous amount of stats they can gather on a daily basis. The fact that Facebook is a lot of things to a lot of people is simply a version of a business model that caters to many users. This allows them to capture a large demographic and create a use of their product by an immense variety of people. I understand that some people might have been attached to the bottom corner bookmarks (as well as many other features that were moved or eliminated) but obviously not enough people since they decided to remove it. Facebook is in part existing because of third-party developers and this is why I do not believe they would dismiss them by reducing the use of apps and games. Under my favorite part of the new Facebook we find a second menu including Applications, Games, Ads and Pages (for us advertisers) and SMS text messaging. This change was implemented for a reason. We can also click on the More arrow and will then have access to our favorite bookmarks, Links and Notes. They simply moved the bottom corner to the top (middle) left hand side of the page. My favorite part of this change is the content a user can find once he or she clicks on the Applications or Games. An entire page is now dedicated to the content. The apps we use, the activity of our friends on certain apps, the apps our friends use (which is refreshed to new content every time we enter, presenting us new apps), and a long long list of apps segmented by verticals. This page is design specifically to help users discover new apps, through their friends or their interests. Like I mentioned at the top my intention is not to start a debate :) I just can’t imagine Facebook making these changes without a thought-out strategy. And if they don’t, well they can always give me the stats and i’ll help them out :p I would be more than happy to sift through all that information hehehe
You can’t say you don’t want to start a debate and then disagree with an opinion. Moreover, why not start a debate? Isn’t that the whole point of publishing opinions on a blog? That said, You say that « The fact that Facebook is a lot of things to a lot of people is simply a version of a business model that caters to many users ». I say that when this is the case, perhaps your best bet is to offer more choices to your client-base as far as UI goes. They could easily offer up more choices and let users decide how they want to use the service. As a FREE service however, i will grant them the option of cornering us now and again as it certainly reduces the cost of support. Is it still true that Facebook has trouble making money? I heard it was way overrated financially, engaging very little real revenue but banking completely on brand-recognition and user information database. The decision to remove the bottom navigation feature seems to me like a strictly business-oriented decision, forcing users to view their profile page more often (in between apps) in an effort to drive up page views and therefore marketing opportunities. To say that this actually benefits the end-user is complete nonsense and that is why i stand by my original point that we WILL see a drop in Facebook usage in the coming year.
Meanwhile… 400 millions active users: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Alright Philippe, let’s debate :) First, Facebook does offer their users many choices. Maybe not in UI because since it’s a networking platform it would be ridiculously difficult but they do offer a wide array of reasons to use their platform. Some use it for pictures, others for networking, advertising, building a following, recruiting….this could be a long list. Everyone that uses Facebook approaches it a different way. Therefore when they make changes to their platform it is obvious that it wont please every kind of user. Second, let’s say they are in the ‘red’ and they need to evolve their platform…I would go for the more business oriented changes. I would encourage it even! I’m sure they didn’t make those decisions while completely ignoring the user. I just simply think they found a way to drive up page views (something all websites want to do….) and give users another way to view the information, applications, games, etc. After a couple weeks, everyone will be used to the changes. It is possible that we’ll see a drop but the point of the post is to make people understand that no change at all would probably result in Facebook being replaced by something better. They NEED to change their platform and keep up. They can do it to better the user experience or to make more money, OR they can find solutions that better the user experience while increasing the time spent and page views therefore increasing revenue. I hope they have enough smart people working those stats to make the right decision. I don’t think they made it this far just by luck…
We agree on a lot of things, Isabelle. Yes, Facebook needs to keep evolving to stay ahead of the game. Yes, the business does have to come first. Yes, Facebook certainly generates an insurmountable amount of user stats that help guide their choices. But, anyone who’s taken economics classes knows that the needs of businesses and the needs of customers are opposite. Business want to sell high, customers want to buy low. Offer and demand set price. Facebook sells advertising, customers avoid it but they’ll accept it as part of a free service. Facebook wants more page views but users want less. I work in e-comm retail and I know that at every click we lose users. Let’s take Gabriel’s number into account here: 400 million active users (I wonder if they count dead people as part of their active user base…). That’s enormous. The company generates annual revenues of $1.2 billion. That’s enormous too. But it still only comes to around $30 per user per year. And that’s just raw revenue that does not take expenditures into account. That is not much. Since they’re driven by advertising, they need to hike up the number of page views and that is exactly what they did. Anyone who uses apps sees their page views double as they now have to go back and forth between apps and the homepage instead of jumping from one app to the next. Like you mentionned, some apps are hidden in the app page that you call up. One more page view. Suppose their click-through stats stay the same that’s double the revenue per user in the end. Based on that, they can certainly stand to irk a few users and lose them. Even if they lost 10% of their base, they would still see their revenue increase by 80%. In economics, they call this demand elasticity. Basically it’s a measure of how much more you can ask of your clients before the loss of clients outweighs the increase in price. Facebook is therefore running a great numbers game. The business needs outweigh the users needs so the change does not need to be beneficial to them. The change needs to benefit Facebook. I will also surmise that Facebook was aware that this change would cause dissatisfaction and that this is why they populated the change over a long period this time. A friend of mine got the new layout a full month before I did and my wife got it a week later than me. Last time they made a change they just set a date and everyone remembers the complaints that surfaced. Phasing out the change was all about breaking up dissent. Once someone started complaining, another person would say I’ve been on it for a while and it works okay. It was a spectacular operation and Facebook deserves kudos for that. But don’t tell me that it was a change that was done for the users because that just sounds like nonsense to me.
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