New Facebook Sucks, Wait… What?

Facebook has been catching lots of heat lately for the latest major update.  It’s quite obvious Facebook is trying to grab a piece of the Twitter pie.  Is this a good move for Facebook, or is it the defining final direction Facebook will ride to its demise?  Let’s examine.

Twitter exploded to mainstream popularity in 2008 with its short character updates and real-time dialogue.  Britney Spears, Barack Obama, John McCain are just some who have jumped on the bandwagon of Twitter.  Facebook is trying to cash in by changing their homepage layout to function much more like Twitter.  However, just because it works for Twitter doesn’t mean the same is true for Facebook.

Twitter works because it is short snippets of information.  Intellectually, they are easy to digest and process.  Facebook is trying to now deliver massive amounts of real-time information like Twitter, but there is no restriction on the amount.  All of a sudden you have videos, photos, statues, application updates (can get very spammy and annoying!) and those notorious pokes coming your way.

Facebook could rapidly be heading into what is known as ‘information overload’.

Information overload occurs when an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information. (Wikipedia)

The main complaint from Facebook users as usual with a large update is purely confusion.  This will pass in months to come.  Zuckerberg cannot measure such a roll-out and its success within weeks, it will takes months to see how it is adopted or thrown away by users of the popular platform.

So far, traffic seems to be unaffected by the change so there isn’t any large scale revolts quite yet, though petitions are circulating on Facebook as I type this.  It is interesting social behavior that users who want to revolt and either get the platform changed or encourage users to leave…use Facebook to facilitate it.

A poll taken at Techization’s sister site FacebookStudy.com show a majority of users ‘hate’ the new Facebook homepage.  This isn’t surprising in the least, it was actually my anticipated result.  If we come back to this topic in 6 months, I think that same poll would be very different.  It is no secret that humans are creatures of habitat.  We like familiarity and hate change with a passion, usually!

Just give it some time folks, just give it some time!