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.)