Facebook announced on Friday that they were changing the design on their home, finally jumping to the real-time wagon. I was one of the people that were excited about the announcement, as I am big believer of the real-time web.
The problem for Facebook is that, in my opinion, most of its users never really wanted real-time.
The other problem is that the approach they took is really confusing, as they have basically introduced two homepages instead of one.
That’s why today we are beginning to roll out some changes to the home page that simplify your experience by offering two views of News Feed: a summary view of the most interesting activity that’s happened in the last day and a real-time view that shows you what is happening right now.
That sounds like a discussion between Zuckerberg and his top Engineers that didn’t come to one final conclusion.
Why two views?
I measure every non-geek’s person point of view by watching my wife’s reaction to things. She’s far more of a Facebook user than I am and she was completely lost by the “twin view”. Which one is the one I need to see first? Why aren’t these posts here?
Looks like Facebook couldn’t make its mind and gave us the best of two worlds: one curated by our activity on items and the other mimicking Twitter’s firehose.
I think that maybe Facebook doesn’t need real-time. I honestly think that the majority of their user base is comfortable with refreshing the page — the way they’ve done so far.
But then what does Facebook do about the recently hired FriendFeed team? Isn’t that what they’re supposed to bring? The real-time web?
If you read the comments on Facebook’s blog, you’ll see people are angry. But that’s normal Facebook user’s reaction to change.
Except this time they might have a point.
By the way, thanks to Steve Rubel’s blog, I share this tip with you. If you want the old homepage back, just go to the “more” link on your left rail and drag the “Status Updates” module all the way to the top (see the really simple video below).
Then sit back, relax and wait until Facebook makes up its mind.
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