Facebook addresses whining over recent redesign

It's axiomatic that any site redesign will cause hysterics among some portion of the readership. But Facebook's user complaints over the new look have succeeded to the extent of eliciting a lengthy, slightly abashed, and palpably frustrated blog post from Chris Cox, the company's "director of product," discussing where the site goes from here.

What users apparently will not succeed in doing is in getting Facebook to back down from its new, more Twitter-like mien. The post outlines a variety of adjustments in the works, including live page updating (no more hitting Refresh!), better control over which applications intrude in one's stream, realignment with the new Highlights features to bring it back in line with the old News Feed functionality, and some reorganization of navigation components.

Cox revealed that Facebook, like many other information-rich sites, is grappling with the problem of balancing prime real estate between the most up-to-date news and the stuff that's worth keeping up front for a while. "In the last few weeks," he writes, "you've seen us shift the main emphasis towards real-time conversations and updates as the entry point to Facebook. We're working hard to make this stream more valuable, and also to build out the richness and relevance of the Highlights section."

Response to Cox's post has varied from the usual all-caps meltdowns, fist-shaking, and whining that the type's gotten smaller to cogent requests for changes to such features as Wall-to-Wall, notifications, and layouts.

And yet one amusing user made the effort to have it both ways: Rachel MacKenzie, after lashing Cox for exhibiting Facebook's "groupthink" concerning real-time updates, added in a separate post, "Oh, and now that I've left my reasoned constructive criticism, I would also like to add that Zuckerberg is a douchebag twerp." Noted, and probably as useful to the process as most of the rest of the comments thread.

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