Facebook and I go way back.
I joined thefacebook.com in late 2004 / early 2005 when I was a senior in high school. I did this mainly because I moved from Texas my senior year in high school and wanted to stay in touch with my friends.
My time and experience here at UoI has taught some ideals when it comes to user interfaces. They must be simple and customizable.
Facebook started out very simple with limited features and things you could do on the site. Overtime they have grown and added many things, including applications, like that of MySpace.com. One way in which they succeeded in keeping many of their members was customizability (if that's a word) of various privacy and profile settings. They seperated out the extra features in a way where one would not get annoyed or overwhelmed by them if they did not want to be.
Recently, at least for me, Facebook has been failing my standards of customizability. They have updated their user interface several times without the option to keep the old standard. People hate change, especially when forced upon them. Although we must deal with it and eventually will learn to like the newer interfaces, every time they implement a new design, we are forced to relearn almost everything.
The newest design is meant to compete with a site called Twitter. Twitter focuses on status updates. I believe it is good for Facebook to keep up with it's competition, but I do not believe changing their site to that of Twitter was a wise idea. Facebook was it's own unique social networking site. People generally use Twitter for the newer phone technologies so they can stay in contact while mobile. I feel Facebook could keep the changes, but allow people to select whether they want a "Twitter type interface" for their phone or the older one for their home pc which people are more familiar with and can navigate easily.
I hate how everything tends to blend in on the pages because now there is a picture next to everything.
I hate how they made the default settings show status' on the newsfeed and pushed the other highlights to a small column on the right.
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