Since the redesign of the newest Facebook improvements regarding the front page of the site, people have sparked outrage and many communities have gotten together to show that they have an issue with the new layout.
Following the design of Twitter, Facebook has created an integrated news feed that allows all of the elements to be dynamically updating, filterable, and completely user controlled.
Issues some users have expressed have been along the lines of general confusion over the new layout, however specific reasons for the dislike over the layout seem varied and hard to correlate.
"Since we launched Facebook's home page design, we've received thousands of emails, Wall posts and comments from you along with direct feedback from all of our friends and family," product director Christopher Cox posted Tuesday. "We will be giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream."
For those of you hanging on to the edge of your seats for this wild ride, Cox notes that "we're focusing on improvements immediately and over the next several weeks." Hopefully that means that all of the issues people have submitted will have been resolved. Then again, can you really make 175 million users happy?
[via Google AFP]
Thursday, March 26, 2009
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redesigns of Facebook are about making white space, not about user service. The site has to be monetized, and with 200 million users getting a free marketing channel, newsy gossip, etc., they cannot allow the Twitter innovation to eat their lunch even before they slice the baloney. The ad revenue model that supports Google has only been mildly successful--how many people click through a FB ad? From user perspectives, all this nifty free stuff starts to feel like a "right," but someone has to pay for the bandwidth, servers, etc. The question to ask any site the first establishes a user community is whether users would be willing to pay for what they have have been taught to believe ought to be free.
And the companies are screwed. Let's suppose people all agreed that $5/year for Facebook was not extreme--that's a mere $1 billion in revenue. While that looks tempting, the cost of entry into most Internet user businesses, especially those that rely on user-created content, would likely create a competitor in minutes--suppose MySpace then offers its services for $2/year.
The cost of services online pushes to zero all the time. Most worldwide cyberspace activity is still carried forth on telephone networks--yet the telephone companies, by and large (untrue in China), are prohibited from taking a fee for traffic. Suppose you built a road designed for cars, and then were told you had to strengthen and reinforce it because we'd just learned the value of trucks--far heavier and so inflicting wear and tear at a greater rate. Oh, by the way, you cannot charge the trucks a toll...that's the situation with telephony. Skype and other VoIP services, with the convergence of technologies onto hand-held computers (read: "iphone") will eventually need to either be taxed to level the competitive playing field, or be outlawed, for the same reasons.
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