Facebook has upgraded their site yet again. I noticed the beginning of it the other day when the first thing they changed was how your inbox looked and worked.
Then when I got off air tonight, I noticed a lot more changes. Some of these changes I noticed immediately. Others took awhile for my brain telling me something is different for me to notice exactly what that difference was and go OMG THAT is what is different.
Now the first immediate change I noticed and I know I will personally find a pain in the ass is you now have two options on your news feed wall: 1) summary and 2) live feed. If you click summary, you miss a lot of things, like status updates in real time. Even when you update your own status, it will not appear in summary mode. However if you click live feed you see those updates BUT you once again see every little thing someone does, including when they friend someone. I do not want to know everytime someone adds a new friend. I have some chronic app users as friends and as it is, if I step away from Facebook for even 10 minutes I have this thing telling me there are 75 new updates. As it is, I miss a lot of what my friends are doing. I am not one of these people that keep my book open all the time. And it is not like I have this huge list of friends on facebook, some are just chronic.
The second change I noticed (and this is the change I really like) is with the old Facebook, if you went idle and returned to your news feed, a message awaited you telling you how many updates were made while you were away. You click that link and it would show them. However, it would not show your own updates in that timeline. So then you would have to refresh the whole page. That is a pain. However now if you return to the page, it automatically shows you the new updates (that is if you have selected live feed). This integration has to be as a result of their purchase of FriendFeed as it has the same function.
The third change I noticed is kinda cool. If someone updates their Facebook using Twitter, there is now a link under that update that say follow@___. So if for whatever reason you did not know your friend uses Twitter and you just happen to use Twitter, it makes adding them easier.
The next change I noticed (and this is when I said OMG THAT’S what is missing!) is one of the sidemenus. Before you would have this one box that would show you one suggestion. Either a friend suggestion or become a fan of this suggestion because this many of your friends have this connection with you, or they may just happen to be on your WindowsLive Messanger contact list but you haven’t added them yet for whatever reason. Then you would have to click a “see more suggestions” link to see a page of suggestions. Under that WAS what allowed me to know what was going on with people as I get so many updates on my news feed, most get missed. You had this great little area which displayed so and so was tagged in this photo, so and so posted this note, so and so posted this new album, so and so posted this video. And it would rotate. That was the only way I could keep up. Out of the less than 200 people I have added to Facebook, I may have visted 4 of their actual profile pages. I just don’t have the time and that is what that wonderful feed was suppose to do. Well that wonderful section is now gone and they have once again made the friends suggestion area bigger like the old old facebook. I really do not like this change. Especially since I have used the suggestion box maybe 10 times.
One final change I have notices is at the very bottom of your news feed. You have to scroll to find it and it wasn’t until pass number 20 of that page to find all the changes my brain was telling me were there did I notice this. Or maybe it was there before but I did not notice it until now. There is a link that will tell you how many updates are hidden and clicking it will show x number of hidden updates. As well, if you decide to disable certain updates from appearing in your feed, there is a little edit options link there as well that will show you which applications you have hidden from your feed and an option to add them again to your newsfeed.
The next thing I noticed (just now) was that they moved the Event area which displays birthdays, upcoming events you may have signed up for above the suggestion area so that you do not have to scroll down to the bottom for reminders. This is good.
These are all the changes I have noticed now. Already a lot of my friends are complaining about Facebook changing but I doubt they even know what changed. They just see that it is different and it must be bad. There are two changes that I really do not like and it will make it even more difficult for me to know what some of my friends are doing. However the rest of the changes range from neutral to that is cool and I like.
It will be interesting to see what they do to FriendFeed.
EDIT: I just noticed another change that I really really do not like. The only way to see comments made to things your friends have posted, is through the summary view. Having to switch back and forth is going to suck.
