Now that I’ve had a few days to play with the new Facebook look, I’m beginning to really like it. I’m not a huge fan of the 140-character limit for tweets (er, status updates) but I completely understand why they are doing it.
I’ve been though enough redesigns to know that a big part of the feedback you immediately get when you redesign is always “OMGWTFBBQ YOU CHANGED IT!!!! I HATE CHANGE!!” And, in the case of Facebook, that’s most of what I’m seeing.
Ironically, it’s really not a stunningly large change, except for the rounded corners. Which you won’t even see if you use IE. (Of course, if you use IE6, you’re getting exactly what you deserve.)
Look, folks, Facebook is not trying to become Twitter. What they’re trying to do is replace Twitter — and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Remember, Facebook tried to buy Twitter and got turned down back in December. The FB folks clearly think that microblogging is important to Facebook’s future development.
The major advantage Twitter has over FB is the speed and simplicity of its updates, especially on mobile devices. The major advantage FB has over Twitter is its depth. You can share all sorts of info you can’t on Twitter — posting photos and videos, using apps, playing Scrabble knockoffs, etc. So if I’m a Facebook strategist, I’ve gotta be looking at the growth of Twitter and thinking “if we can offer the same level of quick posting and mobile utility that they do, the rest of our feature set is compelling enough to make folks stay with us or never migrate to Twitter.”
What’s interesting to me is that the folks I follow on Twitter, and my followers, don’t at all correspond to my Facebook friends. There’s probably a 10 percent overlap, at most. I think that could be partially because my Facebook friends aren’t jumping on Twitter, but it’s also because, to be honest, I don’t want all my Twitter followers and friends to have access to my FB page. Not because I’m posting drunken debauchery on FB, but because I like to keep my circle of friends pretty small. The more people I follow on Twitter, the more stressful it becomes. I have no idea how Jen Reeves keeps up with everything that’s going on with her flock. I feel similarly about FB — if I have too many friends, I really don’t know what’s going on with any of them.
Anyhow, my point is that the FB redesign is not the end of the world. In the long run, I’d really prefer one device/site/whatever to check, rather than a million places to go to find out what’s new with folks.
And on that note, I gotta run. I have like 200 RSS feeds to read … 
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