Facebook Redesign Mimics FriendFeed
Facebook is finally unveiling the site redesign it promised some five months ago. The new look features a redesigned main page with a new menu bar of tabs for navigating between the various part of the site. Access to the new design is limited for now, but Facebook has promised it will be available to all users in the coming days.
Although Facebook’s new layout retains the blue and white flavorings of its predecessor, the structure of your data under the new design bears more than a passing resemblance to FriendFeed.
For instance, under the new interface, your status updates, wall posts and news feed items have been combined into a single content stream — just like what you’ll find of FriendFeed.
And of course Facebook also recently introduced the ability to drag in your Twitter posts and other outside information, which means you could, if you wanted, more or less re-create the data, and now the look-and-feel, of FriendFeed inside Facebook.
Naturally you still can’t get any of your data out of Facebook.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the redesign is that it seems to purposefully push Facebook apps into the background. Apps can now be found under a new tab labeled (for no apparent reason) “Boxes.” “Applications.” The tab was called “Boxes” until it was apparently changed Monday morning.
While that has already raised the ire of the developer community, since finding and installing apps will require a separate trip to the Apps tab, it seems like a nice way to avoid the cluttered, spammy and utterly useless apps that currently litter my Facebook homepage.
If the new look doesn’t work for you, you can still switch back by clicking the “Back to Old Facebook” link at the top of the page. Of course eventually the new look will be replace the old, but until then you might be able to influence the designers — Facebook would like to hear your feedback on the new design, so if you love it or hate it, let them know.
See Also:
