The New Facebook - Good or Bad?

Editors Note: This post was originally written by Danny Braglievsky – the thoughts and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of my own.

Yesterday, I was reading online and found an article about the new, upcoming Facebook layout/redesign. In this article, it told you how to access the new design to ‘test’ it out. To do this, go to http://new.facebook.com, and it should load for you.

If that worked for you, you’d be greeted with the following screen:

It looks much different than the current Facebook layout. As you can see, you have 4 main buttons at the top of the screen; (Your Name), Friends, Applications, Inbox. Underneath, you have your “Newsfeed”, and on the right you have your status updates, pokes, requests, etc. This new layout “opens” the area up. It looks less cramped and is easier on the eyes.

Next, if you click on your own profile, you will notice some drastic changes:

It seems that this new layout is “tab” oriented. At the top of the page you will see 5 tabs–Wall, Info, Photos, Boxes, +. This makes Facebook much more organized and easy to use. Under the “Wall” tab, you will see all of your wall posts, and your mini-feed.

The good thing about this organization, is that you won’t be bothered by all the applications that are above the Wall, so you have easy access to it.

Under the “Info” tab, is all of your info. It shows your networks, groups, contact info, personal information, etc. Its just a much more organized method than what they previously had.

When you click on the “Photos” tab, you’ll see that the picture organization has been totally revisited.

They completely got rid of the “Added by You” and the “Added by Others” system of organization. Now they just clump them together, which, in my opinion, was a smart choice by the developers. Who really cares who added the picture? And underneath the pictures are all of your albums. Kudos to the Facebook team for organizing it like that. Its much more user friendly.

Finally, under the “Boxes” tab, are all of your applications. They are all clumped under one tab, which was a great idea. Now I don’t need to look at “What Kind of College” my friends will go to, or “What Drink” they are. I pretty much use facebook to write on people’s walls. And its annoying when they have all of their applications above their wall. Now its a much easier system to do what you want.

With the “+” button, you can add a new tab, based on the applications you had installed:

So if I wanted a quick link to my notes, I can have it. A good idea for people who have applications that are worthwhile to use every day.

Do I have any bad things to say about this new layout?

Well, first of all, it takes some time to get used to. But you’ll get over that. My main pet peeve about this new layout, is that when you’re looking at the posts on your wall, there is no direct “reply” option. There’s only the “wall to wall” option, which is good; but I wish they could include a reply button, that opens a small box underneath the post (using AJAX or something), so that you can reply, and then it’ll close.

Next, some of their code needs to be fixed. When I click to go to the 2nd page of albums, it doesn’t work and gets stuck till I have to refresh the page. They should work on that. Another thing, is that on your main “Wall” page is that you can update your status, but it doesn’t show you what your status is. Sometimes I’d like to know what I put for my status.

Otherwise, there are a bunch of little changes that I haven’t mentioned in here. Overall, I think this is a very good design switch, but it’ll take time to get used to it. Of course there are a few other issues that the developers need to correct, and hopefully when they completely switch over all of these errors will be corrected.

What do you think about the new layout? Feel free to comment.

-Danny