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#FF00AA

4 mar. 2009

Facebook Redesigns Home Page — Again

Going live next Wednesday, Facebook takes yet another step into FriendFeed territory (which includes, but is not limited to, trying to knock Twitter off its perch) with a self-refreshing ajaxy home page that looks nice enough.

But then, I already can’t leave Facebook open too long because the Javascript chat seems to hog resources, so I’m a little bit afraid of what the fun scrolling news feed might do to Safari.

Thanks to updates to Facebook’s privacy settings, users will now also be able to follow others without having to become actual ’friends.’ This is basically the same ’friendship’ model that Twitter has implemented on its service.

I don’t know that I like that. That is, I know I don’t, but I’m not sure yet whether I’m right about it — feels to me like this is stepping a step too far in abandoning the Facebook “friend” model. (And it’s also going to wreak havoc with privacy settings: either your updates are public by default and people will complain that it’s stalkerish to let non-friends subscribe to your news feed, or they’ll be private and the feature will be utterly useless.)

2009/03/04 - 22:22

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Xarro, 6 years ago:

Actually it might be pretty clever: sooner or later everyone is going to run screaming from Facebook, because of all those nerdy former classmates, who want to be our "friends" and we are so embarrassed about. And they shall post animated GIFs... it happened before (to MySpace) and it will happen again (to humans and cylons alike... uh, wait, I'm confused).

So moving on to a Twitter-like community might be a smart way to ensure a longer lifespan for FB. There's no form of embarrassment involved in being followed by whoever on Twitter. One doesn't have to accept or refuse followers. No awkward situation!

(Of course, I do realize that my reasoning is flawed by the fact that we were the social outcasts in high school. :p)

garoo, 6 years ago:

Yeah, but:
- the farther away they go from their roots, the more room they leave for someone to remake Original Facebook right
- there's already been an uproar once about how stalkerish news feeds were, and I'm pretty sure it's going to happen again when people realize they can be followed (although I suppose there ought to be a "block" option... like there is in Twitter, actually)

As much as I admire Facebook for always reinventing itself, I think the 1:1 connection was essential to the concept. I'd much rather keep it, and have more options to organize and rank my friends so that updates from my courtesy friends disappear from my home page — instead of having to remove not-real-friends (ooh, the drama!) and leave them as followers. That's not going to work.

Xarro, 6 years ago:

That exists already but it's not presented as such and is rather a lengthy and tedious process. :/

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