The Changing Face of Facebook

So Facebook is planning a big Profile Page redesign in the next few months, and I for one am excited about it.

I'd had a MySpace page for a while, but eventually I stopped visiting most of the pages on MySpace for a few reasons. 1. Music that starts playing on page load. I think this was the most annoying of all the reasons. Imagine surfing the web, listening to your music on Rhapsody or whatever, and all of a sudden your ears are assailed with the latest AFI that someone decided must play for every visitor to their myspace page. It became a race for me to find the music module and make it stop before the first note. More often than not, I lost. 2. No standard on background, text, font, javascript, or layout. I'm not sure who the first person who thought it would be clever to change your cursor to the + all the time, or make it a <-> thing over links, but this is ANNOYING. When i'm on a website I should be able to expect to not lose something as important as my mouse cursor. Also, having something like your text not disappear into your background image . . . even though it is a cool image of a sunset or something, is important if you want people to visit often and read the things that you've taken the time to write. 3. Everything just seemed to be so cluttered, I didn't know where to look to find friend's updates, or comments, or new photos, there was stuff just everywhere.

This is exactly why I loved switching to Facebook over a year or so ago. They had locked down the bulk of the profile look and feel, and I thought it was a great idea. Everything was easy to read, I knew where to look on a page to find things like Pictures or Wall Posts. It was organized, convenient and made sense. Over the past year though, they added the Facebook Application API, which I thought was a really cool idea. You could customize your profile page with a few apps and widgets that represented you, or allowed you to do neat things, but still in an organized layout with some standard rules applied. But wow, did the whole apps thing explode.

Now, I may have to scroll for 2 minutes to find a person's wall after running past their list of 10 different sports teams they follow, two flower gardens, three gift giving applications, 23 pieces of flair, 14 "I'm [Character X] from [Show Y]" Quizzes, Zombie Attack, Pirate Attack, Pirate-Zombie Attack, fun-wall, no-fun-wall, pain and misery wall, then finally the thing I'm interested in. Half of which the apps that I'd actually be interested in seeing the details of, I can't unless I sign up for that app; thus possibly cluttering my own profile page with. Oh and did I mention I have to nag 5 of my friends to sign up for the app too, well only if I want to take the test that will tell me that I'm like Buster on "Arrested Development".

This is why I'm very looking forward to the new redesign. Everything is going to be broken up into convenient tabs. If I want to see what's new with my friend, I click on the Feeds Tab; right at the top. If I want to check out their pictures, bingo, another tab at the top. Perhaps they updated their profile, easy that's on a tab too. Which character from "The Office" are they most like? Well I can head to the application tab for that, or if they've made their own tab just for "Which Character Quizzes" then bravo, even simpler.

Anyone else out there agree with what I'm going through, and looking forward to this improvement as much as I am?