Tales From the Digital Side

Has the New Facebook design (http://www.new.facebook.com) caused Facebook to “Jump the Shark”? [Definition: Jump the Shark: It's a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program (or in this case social network) has reached its peak.]

I think so - if they move forward with this design. I am usually a person who loves change, but I hate the new Facebook design, passionately. I think they may be in trouble, mostly because the changes seem to be about how they “want” you to use Facebook, not how you actually use it.

Here are the things I hate about it:

• The Wall has been combined with Mini-feed. Why? I like the fact that people can write on my wall and other people can see what they’ve written. However, I don’t get a million wall posts a day, so with the new design a lot of my wall posts fall out of view. I want to see the wall conversations my friends and I have had - they amuse me. They are more important to me than a lot of the content I publish. Clearly Facebook considers them clutter.
• They are pretty much forcing me to “lifestream”. Man, do I hate the word “lifestream” (more info). I don’t believe anyone but people in the social networking/advertising/marketing industry cares about lifestreaming. The younger set, just facebooks (note the use of facebook as a verb), they don’t care about lifestreaming. I actually barely tolerated the mini-feed. I like that I can keep up with the people I care about, but I actually don’t care to know what my more casual connections are doing. People who think their lifestream needs upgrading and more functionality are definitely taking themselves too seriously.
• Viewing friends info just got at least 4 times as hard. With everything but the wall/mini-feed moved to separate tabs, I now have to click through several tabs to see my friends stuff. This is pretty self-serving for Facebook - they just got themselves a ton more ad inventory, but I just think I won’t view as much content from my friends, which pretty much defeats the purpose of being on Facebook.
• As an advertiser, I think the new ad placements will perform worse than the current ones. I’d be very careful about purchasing ads on a CPM basis in the future. On the profile they currently now have a top and bottom ad. Two ads should lead to a significant reduction in click-through. Currently, there is no ad on the new home page, which I hope is a bug.
• Less individuality. I have always preferred Facebook’s minimalism compared with MySpace’s hyper-personalization, but I think they’ve overdone it. I want my Red Sox and Patriot’s Fan applications on my main page. Who is Facebook to tell me that is clutter that needs to be regulated to another tab? I want my profile to reflect me, not Facebook’s product manager.

This redesign seems to shift Facebook from being a user-focused site into something that is trying to compete with Twitter/Swurl/Plurk, etc. Interesting to me though, outside my own colleagues in recruitment marketing and digital marketing, not a single friend of mine has even heard of those sites. However, they are all avid Facebook users. I have a feeling that while the industry may love this new design, the real users won’t. If Facebook doesn’t remember that a lot of their users just wants to keep up with their friends, they will jump the shark, just like Fonzie.

So what are your feelings about it? Love it, hate it, feel completely indifferent?