SmithWeb Blog

Just another normal day of social networking… That’s what I thought before I logged on this morning. But wow was I in for a nice surprise. I noticed that Facebook had made a major change to the layout of their site. Instead of the normal news feed that included the activities of my friends, I now had a News Feed as well as a “Live feed.”

I still can’t figure out why in the world they would make such a huge change like this. The Live feed and News feed system doesn’t even make sense. The Live feed displays what the old news feed did just fine and the News feed now displays old information that happened like yesterday….

Normally I’m on the forefront of promoting change on facebook because developmental changes allow for a smoother experience on the site. However this time I must say that I think Facebook has made too much of a drastic change with something that to me does not even make sense.

I made a stir a while back about how terribly facebook’s javascript chat was working. If you paid attention when the chat debuted two summers ago, it worked to perfection. I never got the loading message or the fail message. However after a while it started getting buggy and laggy. Anyway, that issue has gotten considerably better, however this new news feed thing kind of bugs me.
I think Facebook’s main problem is they debut things and expect them to run smoothly when they’ve only been tested in house rather than letting a certain number of public participants test the changes. I think if facebook doesn’t want its users raising a huge stink about the changes and making hundreds of anti change groups, they need to institute public beta testing. That’s the only path to success that I can see, being that Facebook makes changes so often.

So who knows? What’s gonna happen? No changes are gonna be made obviously just because a few of us informed users raise a stink, facebook is above swaying to our voice. However, I guess we’re just gonna have to cut down our use of the social giant or learn to live with the frequent changes.