A Facelift for Facebook

Facebook is quickly becoming the social networking site of choice by many Internet users. It has been around for quite some time but has been gaining momentum in the last year. Many who were spending countless hours on MySpace or other similar social networks seem to be migrating over to the Facebook phenomenon – or at least using multiple sites.

One of the reasons is Facebook’s clean interface and ease-of-use. The navigation is simple and straight forward – it is easy to find out what’s up with your friends. It seems to be built with the end-user in mind. As a web developer who thinks about these things daily, I find Facebook a real treat.

Sometime between when I went to bed last night and when I woke up again this morning Facebook launched their “new look”! – it is a lot more than just a new look – there are some changes in navigation – your inbox – and how networks are managed. You can get the whole scoop at the Facebook blog here.

Here are the highlights…

1. A navigation and profile simplification—Ever feel like you couldn’t find what you were looking for on that long left menu? We’ve redistributed all these menu options into “Core Aspects” on the top menu, “Applications” on the left menu, Settings on the top right, and everything else at the footer of the page. As for the profile, we’ve added drop-down menus to the top of every user’s profile page, making it easier to get to the information you want to see.
2. The introduction of “Inbox”—The former “My Messages” and “My Shares” pages have been redesigned to make the communication between you and your friends easier. Now you can send a group of your friends a message with or without a shared link, and easily track the ensuing conversation in one “thread” in your Inbox.
3. Network Pages—To make networks more relevant to their real-world counterparts, we’ve built out pages where network members, events, trends, and demographic info are displayed. Anything visible on a Network page is something that is already accessible to members of that network, and we’ve added additional “Publicize” options to groups and events that make it easy to distinguish what will and will not appear on your Network page. In addition, each page has a full version for members of the networks, and a public version—with certain kinds of information blocked—for people outside that network.

Read more here…

These changes – especially the navigation changes – are going to take a little getting used to – I am very familiar with how things worked before. However – I think these are good – well thought out changes. Once the original “where’s that�? phase is worked through I think it will be an even easier application to use.

So are you a Facebook junky? What’s your thoughts?