Facebook Gives Itself a Face Lift

Facebook has announced some major changes that have been called a response to the Twitter threat and just about everything else. Just like most things in this Web 2.0 social media whirlwind we live in the change is fast and furious and the opinions outpace the change by a considerable margin.

Erick Shonfeld over at TechCrunch does a great job of outlining the changes that Facebook has announced. The changes are for the homepage, profile pages and activity streams. The highlights are as follows:
No more distinction between private profiles and public pages
Real time updates of the news feed on everyone’s personal page. In essence, Facebook is looking to be more like Twitter.
There is also the implementation of a social graph which is a map of social connections between members

There is a lot more to this and as stated earlier the opinions are many and varied. When this finally rolls out to the 175 million Facebook users then the real stuff will hit the fan as to whether this is the beginning of the future or the end of the beginning of Facebook.

Here’s my take. I sure hope it makes Facebook easier for someone like me to get around. I am not sure if I’m not wired correctly for Facebook but it seems like such a jumbled mess of stuff at times that I just get frustrated with it. I check in from time to time to see what’s up and I have set up a rudimentary profile page for my own blog but other than that I can’t take many more stupid game requests, getting hit with snowballs and people wanting to know 25 things about me. There just isn’t enough time in the day to sort through it so I am hoping Facebook will help to do that for me.

Now I know there will be Facebook zealots who will blast me for not knowing the system well enough and I will help you out here. You’re right. I don’t know it because it doesn’t make me want to know it. Twitter makes more sense to me and I suspect Facebook’s moves toward a more Twitter-like experience give credence to that thought from them as well.

Maybe you Pilgrim types can set me straight on Facebook. Oh and please feel free to tell me all of your thoughts on the business apps for Facebook. That would be interesting for sure.