Why Facebook ain't bad

The new Facebook, like every Facebook update in living memory, has the entire blogosphere in an uproar. “It’s ugly, I don’t know where anything is, it’s pointless, I hate it, I want my mommy, ad infinitum.”

But what ACTUALLY changed? What possible reasons were they changed for? Why do people hate it?

As far as I can see:

Now, if you cast your mind back, a week, to when your Facebook was pristine and perfectly laid out, you’ll remember with fondness how good it was, compared with how ugly and pointless the current change has made it. Oh wait, no, you complained about that change too. And the one before that. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Before we do, I need to show you how this Update is basically cosmetic and – when looked at in individual segments – almost totally a positive change.

SUPER HAPPY GOGO ANALYSIS TIME

1. All notifications clumped

This is an obvious improvement. One criticism of the old model was that it was confusing – this model is clearly designed to fix those perceived flaws. Any information you need to know can be found in a small area at the top of every page. Simple and easy.

This change has two main reasons. a) They wanted to simplify Notifications. b) They wanted to hide shortcomings in their servers. Now I don’t know about your Facebook, but the Notifications for mine generally come about 20 minutes after I have already posted my reply. Sometimes, newer Notifications come through sooner than older ones. What I think is happening, backed up by things said by more computery people than me, is that Notifying some 250 million Facebook users is a huge logistic challenge. Servers aren’t coping with the strain.

Every time that blank symbol at the bottom of the page should near certainly have a notification in it but not visible, you click on it. The little progress bar whirs and the Facebook servers have to track down your account details and drag up any recent changes. Not especially difficult or intensive. Except when you multiply that by MILLIONS. Of the 250 million Facebook users, 100 million of them are American. Imagine a good percentage of 100 million people impatiently hammering the notification icon – all in unison.

To get around this, the Facebook people did something cunning. By moving the Notification tab to the top of the page, you have to be looking at the top of the page to be frustrated at the fact that it isn’t changing. In this way, notifications have a chance to come to you in their own merry time, and in this way, the servers don’t have heart attacks.

2. Apps on sidebar

Now I have a hint about why Facebook did this update in this specific way.

Their servers upload billions of photos every month. They handle hundreds of billions of status updates, wall posts, damn group joining (more on that in another post), astrology readings, thousands of apps spamming thousands of people etc etc etc.

Aaand, if they don’t have to go digging for your particular Apps on EVERY page you view, then you save heaps and heaps of CPU time for, I don’t know, virtual masturbation or something. And besides, when was the last time you used that toolbar anyway? I didn’t even put book

marks on it. So, they put that on the Home page. Since it’s now on the homepage, they don’t need to load it for Friend’s pages, notes, pictures, groups, links, apps etc. Lets break this down:

1. Fewer ‘notification’ server-requests
2. Apps visible less of the time
3. Less overall server-strain
4. Less time and money going into keeping Servers up to scratch with a rapidly expanding Facebook population
5. ?????
6. Profit.

3. News/Live feed in slightly narrower corridor + those lines down the sides.

This, although arguably the most minor of the changes, also counts as one of the most important. It is also entirely cosmetic and – objectively, from a web-design point of view – better.

Take a look at this screenshot from March last year. (Taken off the internet)

As the big red writing says: all the information is on one side of the screen, while the other is rather conspicuously empty. This imbalance won’t register with most users, being the dunder-headed sheeple they are, but it’s there for the viewing.

(I also like one of the comments on this guys wall. “I am trying to pull myself together to go get frozen yogurt. I need something to throw up that won’t taste bad the second time around.”)

Now compare that lopsided and unbalanced version with the new one – ‘the evil, ugly’ changed version.

Both sides of the screen have stuff on them. The lines either side highlight this symmetry, as well as adding some visual variety to the top-bar. The search area has been expanded and centralised, giving more focus on looking up friends. The Display Pic is always visible, meaning you see what your friends see without having to make posts. The top bar fills the whole top of the screen, diverting attention away from the empty areas at the edges. Better, better, better, better, better.

This is a good change, one that makes Facebook more functional, more aesthetically symmetrical and easier on the Facebook servers. But you will hear almost nobody say this. This is because for the majority of people nowadays, Facebook is the page they use and see the most, and any change to it – without their permission or say-so – feels like a removal of choice. If you consciously think so or not, change feels bad, and I feel like I’m addressing everyone here when I say that you don’t like change, especially change to things you are familiar with. It’s like if Google moved its search bar to the top of the screen and filled the rest of the Google homepage with pictures of dancing monkeys. People would be horrified, and emails and blog posts and letters to the editor and public speeches by politicians would fly everywhere.

Actually, no. It’s dancing monkeys. People would love it.

Maybe that’s a bad example, but you get the idea. We love the familiar. When the familiar changes, we get annoyed – it’s embedded in our brains. And Facebook is for most of us, the most familiar thing you can get on the internet. Every change Facebook has made – for empirical better or objective worse – has evoked a firestorm of criticism from everyone involved. But none of them say – and this is important – WHY they don’t like it. For many, I would say that they don’t have reasons, or if they do have reasons, its because it’s ‘ugly’. But given a month or two, noone raises a peep about it, because the unfamiliar has become familiar once more.

So yeah. The new Facebook is good, and anyone who disagrees is listening more to their emotions and their innate brain chemistry than logic and rationality. Now I am going back onto Facebook, where I won’t complain about any changes they ever make. Not once.