facebook dilutes individuality in the name of optimization

One unintentional outcome of opening up the facebook platform last year was that  facebook pages started looking a lot like myspace pages – littered with silly applications that not only cluttered up the page, but created unbelievable load times on servers. 

The new facebook design streamlines the user experience.

At first I was like many of my friends and didn’t like the new interface. It’s such a huge departure from the old site that it took a while to figure out where everything went and how to navigate around the site. I’m not against wholesale changes to a site as long as the user experience improves and / or there is some inherant value being added.  

Overall the site is still pretty easy to use, but their new design has one major flaw – it heavily discounts all individuality.

Although facebook feeds represent much of the content that drives the social graph and facebook ecosystem, it was the ability of users to customize their facebook page to reflect their personalities through their badges, applications and customization of the page layout that made the site one of the stickiest sites ever on the interweb.

Now my landing page and everybody else’s looks the same.

Whoever thought “boxes” was a good tab name to stick all the items that used to be on the landing page should have their head examined. You might as well have called it “all the stuff that made you come here in the first place but which facebook has deemed irrelevant on your behalf.”

I would love to see the stats on application and group use and removals since the new design as i’m sure their drop would rival the stock market right now.

What use do I have for my twitter feed, travel map, delicious bookmarks or QR code if nobody sees it? They were effective before because people didn’t have to click to find them. Having a strong sense of self-identity online encouraged me to participate and add to the social graph. 

If all I wanted was a feed of friend and network activity, I would just use friendfeed, social thing, yahoo oneconnect or some other feed aggregator.  

It’s like when you first arrived on your first day of university or college at your dorm – all the rooms and hallways are painted the same colour and looked the same. Sure you still have a community – but no real social interaction occured until people personalized their rooms and halls.

Before you could join the crowd, you had to first assert your individuality. 

I totally get why the new design was necessary and overall they did a pretty good job at it.

My suggestion?

Allow some degree of customization on the personal page so that people can still hang a few badges on their site to maintain a sense of individuality. While they are at, please rename “boxes” to “applications that no longer fit on your homepage, so remove it because nobody is clicking here, man.”