Just a note to say: The New Facebook Profile Is No Longer Optional

1552fb.jpg

Deal with it kids.

It means you’ll get that ribbon of most recent pictures at the top of your profile, your Info and Pictures tabs will be on the left at the side, instead of at the top and you’ll have ten of your top friends pasted down the side.

Despite dire warnings from the technorati, I haven’t found that people are spam-abusing the new recent pictures feature. Though there have been some creative uses for it. I mean, no-one’s been abusing it any more than they abuse anything else…

Other exciting upcoming announcements from Facebook include: Instant Personalisation – described as a Privacy Hairball by internetz commenters and explained here, by us –
Should you be worried about Facebook Instant Personalisation?

More about the new profile on Facebook
photo, mashable

Anna Leach

One thought on “Just a note to say: The New Facebook Profile Is No Longer Optional”

  • You’re missing the point of what’s wrong with The New Profile. It’s not the features of the profile itself that are (necessarily) the problem. It’s the way in which it was rolled out. For nearly a month now, Facebook has been user-unfriendly. It has forced its users to learn and use two separate interfaces depending on whose profile they’re viewing. Forcing it on everyone at one instant would not have been nearly as bad. Instead, they sacrificed usability for marketing purposes to give users the illusion of choice, when really the only choice was in deciding how my profile appears to other people. I had the choice between forcing my new profile on my friends or not.

    I haven’t updated to the new profile yet, but if they had rolled it out in a way that gave me an option to try it without inflicting it upon my friends, I might have switched. Basically, I would have preferred it as an interface option that affected how I view all the profiles on Facebook. That way it doesn’t affect anyone but me. I also wouldn’t have minded an option to switch back and forth, at least during the transition time. That way, the new profile would sink or float based on whether or not it actually is as awesome as they’re telling us it is.

    This is the first time Facebook has put its users in a position where they’re encouraged to muck with their friends’ user interfaces. It’s very different from the past and it will not be forgotten.

Comments are closed.