Facebook is Changing Again!

Hooray!!  It’s time for everyone’s favorite internet game show: Change My Facebook Layout!  Yes folks, the powers that be (Mark Zuckerberg and Co.) have yet again implemented a series of changes to Facebook, annoying many and delighting few but mostly confusing all of us.  Some of these changes are, as always, controversial and perhaps unnecessary, but there is a lot of stuff on the horizon for Facebook that looks like it could actually improve the site’s functionality a lot.  So first, lets look at the changes are ready implemented.

The biggest thing Facebook has done is bring back networks, a feature the company said was defunct years ago.  This time, they’re back with a twist as they act a lot more like Circles from Google+, allowing you to categorize your friends into groups that act as filters for your posts.  It’s a good feature when you want to localize posts to a specific group.  However, in practice it can be clumsy because Facebook auto builds a lot of these groups.  For my summer job as a counselor, my camp goes by several names and so now I have three groups for the same network of friends and contacts.  It’s unnecessary and Facebook won’t let me merge them together.  Also, adding people to your groups has to be confirmed by the other person if it involves work or school.  Google’s Circles are all at your discretion, which I like better.  Even further, some of these groups come with caveats.  “Close friends” according to Facebook means “People you are obsessed with” and anyone in that group generates a notification for any activity.  That’s not what I was asking for, I just wanted to categorize my best friends together.

Facebook is also taking on Twitter with this last rash of changes.  Subscriptions are the new rage in passive-aggressive interactions with people.  If there is someone you want to get information on but don’t actually want to interact with, you can now subscribe to them.  I guess Facebook sees this as a way to get celebrities and organizations to get back on Facebook so people can follow them, but that’s what Pages were for.  Subscribing seems kind of creepy to me, since if I want to follow my friends, why not just friend them?  It’s redundant.

Speaking of redundant, let’s talk about the news feed.  It’s wonderfully confusing now.  At the top you now see the Top Stories since your last visit.  How Facebook decides what the Top Stories are I don’t know, but I can tell you their choices are not mine.  If Top Stories integrated with my Closest Friends group, then I’d be more happy.  Still, you can edit the Top Stories by telling Facebook what you’d like and not like to be listed there.  So it gets smarter over time.  Recent posts are located under Top Stories, but there is a quick link at the top of the page.  I’d rather have recent stories be a tab or something, just to make things more concise.  Tagging a long with all of this is a running ticker of real-time updates on the right side.  Honestly, I’d just prefer real-time updates in the primary feed, but the ticker is fine really and has a good preview engine, allowing you to float your mouse over a story to generate an in-depth look at what your friends are up to.  These updates to the news feed are, like all Facebook updates, varied in their reception.  But they are pretty superfluous compared to the big updates down the pipeline….

At Facebook’s f8 conference last week, the company debuted Timeline, a total reinvention of our profiles.  I’ve taken the liberty of getting access to the developer beta in order to test out the new profile design.  The verdict: I like it.  Finally Facebook’s design seems fresh and clean.  The top of the page has your opening “cover” of sorts.  You can select a picture to be on this first section, showing you in your natural environment with friends.  With this cover page comes thumb nails for your friends, pages, photos, likes, and locations, plus your basic information and access to your “about” section with more info.  Below this is the Timeline proper.  It’s split into two columns divided by the timeline which is in chronological order.  Posts appear on either side in a staggered order, either posts by you or posts from your friends.  It’s essentially a more well designed wall.  Updating your status now has options for “Life events” like getting a job or becoming engaged.  This runs with the new motif of having the Timeline tell your life story.  The Timeline gets more specific the more recent you, but it supports going all the way back to your very first posts on Facebook and gives you digests of each year of your Facebook life.  It’s kind of creepy to see that Facebook has been archiving every activity you’ve done since the beginning, but the site gives you a week to comb through your history and clean out anything incriminating…. how considerate.  Also on the creepy side is that you can really alter history.  Clicking on the timeline at any point allows you to insert a post at that date, meaning you can change how things went down in your digital life.

The Timeline is launching in the coming weeks.  While it’s an adjustment, my penchant for clean UI design makes me enjoy this update a lot.  It also treats us more as humans with a story to tell through our digital lives.  Maybe people will be more careful online now that Facebook is our digital narrative.

Read about Timeline here

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Facebook Gets Skype, Google Gets Social

L’shalom my dear readers. Excuse the Hebrew and blatant Judaism in the greeting, but that’s kind of the world I live in now with my summer job. A lot of stuff has erupted in the social scene over the past couple of weeks and I haven’t been able to report on any of it due to time constraints. Regardless, it’s been an impressive couple of weeks for Facebook and Google, so let’s break it down.

Facebook last week unveiled their new deal with Skype which brings voice chat to Facebook. The announcement was not ground breaking but more of a nice progress report for the social networking giant. Face book’s partnership with Skype is pretty interesting since Microsoft just recently purchased the VoIP company. Perhaps Microsoft bought Skype knowing about the Facebook partnership and wanted to use Skype as a Trojan horse into the company. That’s one expensive Trojan horse but I still can’t figure out Microsoft’s reason for the purchase so this remains my top explanation.

The real big news was Google’s unveiling of their oft-rumored social networking platform, Google+. After days of searching I found an invite and have been exploring the service ever since. My verdict so far: it’s Google’s Facebook. Whether that’s good or not remains to be seen. Google+ is pretty simple. You have a basic profile and associated friends. A “Stream” acts as the newsfeed which displays updates from your friends. Where Google+ really excels is in the use of “Circles”. These are layers of friendship that allow you to organize friends by what they really are: family, friends, acquaintances, or just celebrities you are following. Circles takes back the overuse of the word “friend” by breaking contacts back down into their real physical relationship. It also allows for more specialized distribution of data to just the right people you want to get certain information.

But in the end, Google+ is nothing ground breaking. Like Facebook you make friends, share content and post messages to other people. It has a chat infrastructure through GChat that allows for video communication. Of real benefit is the tighter integration with Google services like GMail, Picasa, and Google Buzz. All these services funnel into Google+, finally providing a social layer to these independently weaker products. That may be how Google can take on Facebook. They’ve got the search, email, and mobile front in the palm of their hand. And finally, Google+ is not a kludge like Facebook. It’s clean and minimal unlike Facebook’s jigsaw puzzle-like design showing bits of older designs everywhere.

In the end, the social network war may be beginning, but it’s stupid. Facebook has 800 million users. Its de facto. Google+ will never be good enough to get me out of Facebook’s ecosystem. It will only supplement it.

Facebook’s “Project Titan”, Ambitious But Flawed

After weeks of whispers and complaints from across Facebook about a “new messaging system” , it has become clear that Project Titan finally launched throughout Facebook.  My account was apparently part of the last batch to receive the new feature, so this week has been all about adjusting to the new system, learning its ins and outs.  Over the week, I will say that I’ve gotten used to Titan, as I have with every update Facebook forces upon me.  However, “getting used to” and “enjoying” are far different things.  Titan is ambitious to be sure, but it also irreparably changes the way we communicate on Facebook to make the system less adaptive to how we communicate.

To refresh everyone’s memory, Titan is designed to seamlessly unify all forms of communication in on Facebook between friends into a single, continuous conversation.  This effectively breaks down the walls between chat, messages, and optionally text messages and emails into a single conversation.  By itself, this system seems pretty cool.  Allowing your conversations to easily transition between all these forms of communication can be very useful.  Having text messages and email integration (through a provided @facebook.com address) has opened new doors for conversations through the Facebook system.  Not only that, but in the process Facebook has cleaned up the UI for messages.  It’s simply cleaner to look at and more readily usable for quick messages and long posts alike.

Where Titan fails however, is in that it fails to understand how we use Facebook’s plethora of communication avenues.  Plainly, people use chat, wall posts, and messages for different tones of communication.  Chat allows for spontaneous conversations, sometimes casual or more serious.  Messages are often used for more serious conversations when privacy is valued or for making plans with friends.  Wall posts finally allow people to share information or provide quick and casual messages with one another.  Breaking down the walls between these very different levels of formality and intended message is a major flaw in Titan’s design.  Now, all messages and chats are interpreted by Facebook as one running conversation even though that is rarely the case.  A message between a friend and I can be on a very serious issue, or an argument, or making plans; and then my chat one week later can be a quick update on those plans or showing a funny video found that day.  Chat and messages are not the same conversation.  Facebook has failed to see that we use all these forms of communication different, and tying them all together ruins the nuance of each independent system.

Worse yet is how chat conversation have polluted the messaging page.  My inbox is already filled with hundreds of needless threads and the process of deleting them is arduous enough.  Now, your chat log is also archived in your message inbox as well.  Thus, new threads have popped up over the week sometimes composed of one tiny message or a brief conversation with people I’ve had to contact out of necessity (or even mistake).  As a friend of mine also reminded me, this renewed archiving of chat and messages can sometimes bring back conversations we’ve wanted to forget (face it, we’ve all had them).  So now we have an inbox filled with unimportant or embarrassing or long forgotten messages and conversations, ones that stitch together multiple conversations because Facebook seems to think they’re all related.  Oh, and it’s super annoying to receive a chat message when you get a message in your inbox with the exact same content.

Titan is ambitious, I’ve already said that.  And for the attempts it makes at unification, it defies the way we usually use Facebook’s communication services.  Yet again… Facebook delivers a lemon that we will only tolerate, but never really love.

iCloud is Go!

This morning, Apple uncharacteristically pre-announced the oft-rumored “iCloud” service – a new cloud-based syncing and media streaming system run through MobileMe.  Apple will fully unveil the technology at WWDC.  Why the company has announced this service instead of surprising an audience at WWDC is a mystery, but I can imagine it frees up more time for iOS and OS X Lion.  In the meantime until WWDC on June 6th, speculation is at a fever pitch about what the new service will offer.

iCloud’s most hoped for feature will be a cloud-based music player.  Many media outlets report that Apple has inked contracts will all the major music labels to allow for their content to float on Apple’s servers and be dished up on demand.  Hopefully, Apple will allow users to mirror their iTunes library onto their “iCloud” account and access their music on the go.  From that service users can listen to or download new music to their mobile devices.  That alone would be a great new feature for iTunes, since currently swapping music on my iDevices is an arduous process of syncing up the entire phone.  If this could be done anywhere on a Wi-Fi or 3G signal, swapping in a new album would be far more pleasant of an experience.  Apparently Apple is also scrambling to get movies and TV shows on board too, though that may be a later release and not operate on 3G networks.  Either way, having a cloud music streaming service backed by the impressive library of iTunes would be a major blow to Google’s Music Beta program.

Media streaming is not the only feature of iCloud though.  Rumors also indicated that the service will integrate with MobileMe, allowing for wireless syncing of calendars, contacts, and email between your phone, the MobileMe service, and possibly your home computer.  I’m hoping that the service will also allow applications to be synced back to your computer through the cloud, or at least tell your computer to download new applications that you’ve put on your phone or iPad.  This wireless sync is a major part of what I want in iOS 5 and would make backing up and adding data to your phone are far faster and more pleasant experience.  Course this is only speculation as of now.  We’ll wait until WWDC to get all the goodies on iCloud plus iOS 5 and OS X Lion.  It’s gonna be a big day.

This is the Way the Internet Ends

Friday was the start of a timer, a timer that will countdown to an event that changes our lives forever.  We could have stopped it, I even warned about it in one of my first posts but no one listened.  They never do.  On friday, the last blocks of IPv4 addresses were given out to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that further dole out addresses to end consumers and ISPs.  We are done, the well is dry, after those last addresses are used, no new devices can connect to the Internet.  IPv4, for the uninitiated, is the basic protocol of the Internet, the binary code that is assigned to each and every internet connected device.  It’s like your computer’s phone number.  While there are numerous technologies acting as intermediates in transmission of packets (subnets, VPNs, NAT – which we’ll come back to soon) in the end you need a sending IP address and a receiver address.  If you don’t have that, you don’t have a connection and you don’t have communication and you don’t have the internet.  Hence the problem.

IPv4 is a 32-bit address system, which means it theoretically accommodates ~4.3 billion addresses.  In the real world, there are about 3.7 billion and they’re almost all gone.  Internet traffic has exploded in the past few years, especially with the smartphone revolution.  The Asia-Pacific RIR has been burning through around 10 million addresses a month in 2010, according to ArsTechnica and they just got their last block.  The other RIRs for Africa, North America, Europe and South America have a little more time with less demand.  But there are now less than 100 million addresses left, and they will most definitely be eaten up in 2011.  This is the year the internet will reach its limits and we only have two solutions: NAT or IPv6.

NAT is network access translation, and is a technology that allows multiple devices to share a single IP address.  You see this often with public networks at your local Starbucks et al. While this works, it adds major complexity to communication, since your router is now going to have to do some major negotiation to figure out where to send data.  Usually a NAT system generates a “master address” from the public IP block and then dishes out private addresses (a special block of addresses meant for closed networks) to all the clients accessing it.  These days, your router already does this in some capacity, either with private addresses or subnet masks etc, but it isn’t mandatory.  In the end your computer still (in most cases) has its own IP address.  But that’s just not gonna cut it much longer.  NAT is a stop-gap solution at best, it allows for more clients to join the internet but adds complexity and reduces performance in non-trivial ways.  It also makes some protocols unreliable.

Picture the internet as a city with traffic.  As more and more people have to go to work, they buy cars (addresses) and add to congestion on the roads.  Eventually, congestion got so bad that people started to carpool.  But demand continues to increase to the point where there are too many carpools, so now they switch to minivans (NAT) in order to reduce the vehicles (addresses) being used by singular people.  Now, carpools are becoming so important that they go to multiple destinations, not just the same “office” for similar people (information packets).  Right now, we are entering the “minivan stage” and it won’t be long until those “minivans” have to run all over the city because they are carrying “people” to completely different end destinations.  And no, there is no HOV lane.

Despite New Urbanism advocates who love the concept of carpools, that model doesn’t work on the internet.  Things work best if there is an end-to-end connection between the sender and receiver.  There’s already tons of translation, masking, tunneling, and security protocols that packets go through to get to their destination, so adding the NAT layer only increases complexity even further.  The silver bullet to this is IPv6, the 128-bit technology meant to replace IPv4…. 15 years ago.  Being 128-bit means that there are virtually unlimited amounts of addresses to use.  Every person on earth could have as many IPv6 addresses as the entire IPv4 pool each, and there would still be plenty left over.  IPv6, in the concept of our “city” model would be if the everyone switched to flying cars and the entire city was 3 miles high – nearly unlimited flight space.

However, as of today, IPv6 is implemented by about .5% of the internet.  Transition has been almost non-existent because 1) ISPs are notoriously slow to start implementing an IPv6 leasing system and 2) most home users are not configured to support it.  As such, a transition phase will require a lot of translation between IPv6 and IPv4 traffic.  But is has to happen.

We have a year guys, a year at most to get this right.  After that…. things are gonna get really rough out there on the seas of the internet.

Could Steve Jobs be the Hero HTML5 Needs?

Fall out continues from Google’s announcement last week of dropping H.264 support from the Chrome browser.  It has become clear that while Google hides behind a veil of promoting openness on the internet and ending the codec schism, they are really making a move to promote WebM and even send support to their buddies at Adobe.  It’s bad people and every media outlet with some stake in the future of HTML5 has come out with near universal disapproval.  Of course, some support it in the genuine belief that we should not have royalties associated with HTML5.  While that is a completely valid belief, don’t think for a second that’s Google’s real intention.

So I’m going to suggest something pretty radical here, and bear with me as I explain.  We don’t need Google to be HTML5’s guardian.  Instead, I nominate Steve Jobs.  Over the past few years, Jobs has on rare occasions released manifestos of sorts on topics that he feels are worthy of an extended response beyond his usually terse emails.  It was Jobs who placed the last nail in the coffin on DRM for music downloads when he released his “Thoughts on Music” essay in 2007.  Few fully comprehend how much of a landmark effort that was by Jobs, unequivocally placing Apple is support of a world without DRM.  By later that year, EMI was offering DRM-free content and eventually the entire music industry folded in 2009.

Then, in 2010 Jobs provided another manifesto against the current state of web video with “Thoughts on Flash”.  While less ground breaking than ending DRM, the remarks about Flash laid down the law in Apple’s development community that they will do all in their power to move away from the plug-in that they only begrudgingly have to support.  Jobs alluded to HTML5 often in that essay, but I think he can guide HTML5 away from the damage that Google has created.  It may involve the “Reality Distortion Field” but HTML5 needs an enthusiastic leader.  Jobs and Apple was that leader for iOS, but they now need to lead the rest of the internet.

I’m not saying this because H.264 has to be the codec of choice, but because Google propping up Flash with their move towards WebM.  It’s no secret Google has gotten very cozy with Adobe over the years.  They bundle Flash 10.1 with Android 2.2, Youtube continues to be one of the largest repositories of Flash video on the net, and Chrome now has Flash player bundled in it.  In Google’s ideal world, you will have two options for video: Flash with H.264, and HTML5 with WebM.  Sure, Google may want to see HTML5 end Flash eventually, but not as long as they have such a rich relationship.  Think about it: clearly Adobe was very threatened by Apple’s refusal to adopt Flash video on iOS.  So they turned to Google as their trojan horse into the mobile space.  Google makes it clear they are ok with Flash continuing, this is a quote from their Chromium Blog post yesterday regarding the issue:

H.264 plays an important role in video and the vast majority of the H.264 videos on the web today are viewed in plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight. These plug-ins are and will continue to be supported in Chrome.

See?  Google is saying that if you want H.264 video, just turn to Flash and Silverlight plug-ins.  Plugins like the WebM version arriving for Safari and IE9 soon.

Given that Adobe and Google are creating a power play against Apple and the rest of the MPEG, I think Jobs is the man to continue the support of H.264 as the preferred codec for HTML5.  There should be no compromise.  How does Jobs do this?  Apple extends an olive branch by forgoing the royalties they would get from their contribution to the H.264 standard.  The time is now for Apple to nail Flash’s coffin shut by ensuring that H.264, the best video codec on this damn earth, does not remain a jewel in Flash’s crown.  Help us Steve Jobs, you are our only hope.

Google Misinterprets “Open”, Threatens HTML5

Over the past two years we have seen a different Google emerge on to the internet.  They’re not just a search company anymore, but one of the most integral software companies in the history of the internet.  Building operating systems, web services, sponsoring custom hardware, and powerful browsers.  But as Google’s ambitions have grown, the company’s greed and cliché corporate malice has become more visible.  First they spar with Apple, then they attack net neutrality, and now they threaten to undo all the progress of HTML5 in the past year.  This newest development has arisen from the news earlier this week that Google will drop support for H.264 in HTML5 from the Chrome browser and most likely all their web services.  Focusing completely on their own “open” video codec: WebM, and Ogg Theora instead of the “insufficiently open” standard of MPEG-4/H.264.

Ed Note: Some of this editorial may reference the recent ArsTechnica article “Google’s dropping H.264 from Chrome a step backward for openness” by Peter Bright.  Bright gives an excellent overview of the situation surrounding Google’s decision.  The editorial will use Bright’s remarks and thoughts as support or possibly refute a few of his points.  I recommend you read that article as well at some point for a more complete understanding.

Let’s start at the beginning and weigh how Google considers the term “open”.  To paraphrase Bright’s position, which I agree with: they don’t know shit!  H.264 is the definition of open.  The video codec was designed and standardized by ISO and ITU-T, the authorities on standardization on this planet.  The technology was compiled and developed by a team of engineers stemming from across the industry, voted on and ratified by an international standards organization.  Now, compare that with Google’s WebM.  That was originally called VP8, built by the private firm On2 (in secret) before being acquired by Google.  They released it as a free and open standard, but they have yet to submit it to a standards organization and Google controls the codec by itself.  So you tell me, what is more open here?

The New Battlefront: Wikileaks and the Internet

It has been a turbulent few weeks for America.  On November 28th, Wikileaks – the renegade, whistle-blowing site famous for the public release of sensitive classified documents – struck again with the release of over 250,000 US Diplomatic cables spanning over 40 years.  It has been “the worst leak in US history” by some and a crucial threat to our national security.  Much like “The Pentagon Papers” in 1970, and earlier classified leaks of the Iraq War from Wikileaks in the summer – we are now finding that much of what we knew about our government is not true.  The NYTimes, CNN, and other media outlets continue to comb through the documents and continue to find startling revelations of the US foreign policy on sensitive topics such Chinese censorship, the stability of North Korea, and growing distrust in Russia.

I’m not going to talk about that.  The fact is that these are highly debatable, controversial and complex topics that I have no place weighing in on.  What I will talk about is Wikileaks itself and the beginning of a new cyberwar.  Is Wikileaks doing the right thing by revealing the truth, or are they threatening to break the fragile and sporadic peace on our planet?

Wikileaks actually started as a pretty legit site, receiving awards from Economist magazine for its application as a new media outlet: one entirely run by user submissions.  Amnesty International gave the site an award for uncovering Kenyan police killings in 2009.  However, as the scale of the leaks increased, the site has come to be loathed by much of the world.  The site was founded as a place where journalists could leak classified documents without punishment from their respective governments.  But Wikileaks has become corrupt.  These leaks are not being released in the name of justified information for the masses, but now for a perversion of that belief: that all information, regardless of the effect, must be released.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Facebook, as the world’s most powerful social networking platform, has incredible power in our world for social change.  We have seen the site become the launchpad for many an attempt at social change.  “Causes” streamlined those efforts through a specialized app where you could filter money and recruit others to cause in an official matter.  After the app craze subsided in 2009, groups returned to the limelight as the new face of solidarity with today’s new causes.  All the way, a select few have tried to make Facebook a place of social change and awareness.

And they’ve almost all failed.

Now viral protest is the name of the game, as people show their solidarity with the week’s charity by changing their status or profile picture.  Welcome to the new world of passive-aggressive social protest.  Apparently, all you need to do now is change your status, and you’ve done your duty.

The two greatest foes of this remarkably pathetic form of “awareness” are the “I like it _____” status wave that was supposedly meant to raise awareness about breast cancer, and the newest phenomenon: changing your profile picture to a cartoon character in order to raise awareness for child abuse.  I’m not a fan of either of these movements for several reasons: they are random, they are ineffective, and they are easily subverted.

See, changing your profile to a cartoon character doesn’t actually do anything!  It has nothing to do with child abuse prevention except that someone said it did!  So if I change my profile to a cartoon, am I automatically supporting child abuse prevention?  What if I’m just feeling nostalgic for some Dragon Ball Z or something?  If there was a logo for an organization that actively helped abused children (you know, something like CAPS which my mother worked for), maybe that would be something to support.  But as it stands, there is nothing “real” about it.

The breast cancer awareness effort is possibly more infuriating for its secrecy.  Fun fact: both men and women are affected by breast cancer.  So why was this a secret movement for women only?  Also, being shrouded in mystery made the entire “I like it ____” effort easily mocked, not supported.  As a male friend of mine posted that day (paraphrasing): “I like talking about serious issues like breast cancer out in the open”.  These social “movements” if you can even call it that, lack any real dedication or provide any significant awareness.  There is no solidarity or activated awareness because the efforts are scattershot.  They lack cohesion, unity, or a clear message (if any).  Hell, there are accusations that the “Cartoon Character” plot was actually constructed by pedophiles trying to lure children with friendly looking profiles!  Whether it’s true or not, this shows the volatile nature of these viral movements: they have no leadership or clear origin.  There’s no central organization or head to focus support or provide information.  It’s all arbitrary, randomized, “Cause-of-the-Week” mob mentality.

If you have a cause you feel strongly about, actively help it.  Join an organization, give money, volunteer.  Maybe you can get an organization to present a true, specific and consequential awareness campaign on Facebook.  Because until we have some unified effort with clear and visible goals, Facebook will never be the platform for social change that people so desperately want it to be.

Because Everyone LOVES When Facebook Changes….

If only there was a way to express sarcasm in text.  So in case you haven’t guessed, the title of this post is as such.  You guys HATE it when Facebook changes anything.  The 2.0 update, the rebuilt news feed, the page integration into your interests, etc etc.  It was all met with scorn and anger.  Now in objective terms, the changes were probably for the better, but us teenagers hate losing our muscle memory with the site’s UI.  And so, the anger shall increase as today Facebook is rolling out their new profile page.  Let’s peel through the changes to see if you should opt in or hold off as long as you can.

Gone are the top tabs that were the hallmark of Facebook 2.0.  They have been replaced with a side bar, below your profile pic, that breaks down into the wall, photos, info etc.  Information has seen some expansion.  First off, basic info about your self like education, work, age, languages spoken, and where you live.  Its presented at the top because Facebook wants to show you off as a more complete person, I guess.  In addition, Facebook now asks for info on “People who inspire you” (corny); favorite sports and teams (bad if you’re like me and don’t give a crap about sports); your “philosophy” which is basically a way to qualify your religion or politics beyond “Christian” or “Democrat”.  Below the basic information is a new, distracting picture bar that shows the most recent pictures posted of you.  Why this is in the wall is beyond me.  It’s stupid.  Below that, the status bar has gone the way of the dinosaurs and is replaced by contextual buttons for posting a status, picture, link, or video.  And the wall is more or less the same as it was: sporting that slightly too small text I hate.

The info page has seen the most change.  Everything now is accompanied by huge thumb nails that add unnecessary length to the page.  Ordering has also changed to make education and work first – a shot at LinkedIn I think; then “Philosophy” – information that was in a neat box under your pic is now an unnecessarily large box with thumbnails I don’t care about.  Sports, Arts and Entertainment, Activities, Interests, Basic Information and Contact Info come next.  They all have these stupid thumb nails instead of the old text, and all this info could have been summed up in half the time if I just had the old text by itself.  I don’t like it.

I want information to be tight and concise and easy to find.  Not a bunch of large images randomly sorted and lacking uniform organization (Activities are listed vertically but Interests are given rows?)  The info page is large and clumsy, lacking any ability to reorder the info boxes.  Things that used to take up little space now fill far too much, and worst of all: the ads are inside the profile now!  There’s this huge blank white space to the right of my profile where the ads SHOULD be, but they live in the central column with my profile.  No wonder the page is so long: it’s too narrow!

Photos have adopted the same design that album view previewed this year.  You don’t need to click to the next page anymore, but can continue to scroll down with older photos loading instantly.  It would be great if, again, the page wasn’t so narrow.  If they moved the ads over the line on the right, you could add at least two more columns of photos, reducing the amount of scrolling needed.  This is also a case where the thumbnails are too SMALL.  It’s embarrassing.

Boo Facebook, boo!  You guys have GOT to learn about the Human Interface Guidelines because this was a bad job on all your parts.  It’s a shame too because I can see small slivers of good ideas in here. You’ve improved the information section with interesting additions which give a more complete picture of individuals, friends search has improved with its own page, and the picture engine is better in terms of visual quality.  Your organization has just gone to shit.

I’m still for a total wipe.  Start from scratch and make Facebook into a Rich Internet Application by using cutting edge tech.  Until then, you will only be good enough and I’ll stick to RockMelt when it isn’t crashing or freezing up (a story for another time).