To Everyone Freaking Out about the New Facebook

It’s true, folks. Facebook updated their site. Big time. And that means that the old comfy feel of Facebook that you’ve known and loved for the past . . . few months, isn’t old and comfy anymore. There are (gasp!) new features.

If you haven’t gotten used to Facebook constantly changing by now, then you’re probably never going to. And the “old” Facebook that you know and love and are now bemoaning the loss of? That’s the same “new” Facebook you were hating and despising six months ago. Or whenever Facebook overhauled its site last.

Take a minute and check out this post that was written a few years ago. It shows the design changes of Facebook from 2005-2009. Or go here to see an interactive timeline of the way Facebook has changed.

I don’t mean to dismiss your knee-jerk panic that things are different on the site you use every day to connect to all of your friends (who also use it) for free, but in the end, wailing about how awful the new Facebook newsfeed is is like wailing how terrible George Lucas is for dinking around with Star Wars. Again. Lucas is gonna dink, Facebook’s gonna tweak, and haters gonna hate.

The problem is that Facebook has changed its mind in the past and restored some features from older flavors of its site. Having set that precedent, people feel like if they just moan and complain enough, then everything will go back to the way it was.

Having looked at some of the old layouts, I can honestly say that there isn’t one out there that I light a candle to every evening in its memory. (Some of that is due no doubt to the fact that Facebook changes things so frequently.)

What do I think of the design change? Mixed emotions. Things are in different places, and it took me a bit to find where everything is. But I use Facebook quite a bit, and as I’m using it today, I’m liking some things. I like the latest updates feature in the upper right. I like how easy it is to now tweak how frequently I’m updated on certain people. I think the changes have some merit, and I want to use them some more to see how much I can get out of them.

I’m hopeful, even if there’s a new learning curve. Because if this update lets me customize my news feed more, then that’s a good thing. Not that I ever hide any of my friends. Particularly not you. I check your FB status multiple times an hour, just to make sure I haven’t missed anything. But those posts from everybody else? They distract me too much from your updates, and it would be nice to be able to trim them down some.

So to sum up: everybody calm down. It’s not like Facebook is suddenly charging us to use it, or splitting up its services onto two wholly separate sites or anything. Unlike, you know, *some websites.*

5 thoughts on “To Everyone Freaking Out about the New Facebook”

  1. My problem with it is you, or, well, I at least can’t see today’s stuff, only the “most popular” however they decide that. I liked the chronological style, the friend bar on the sides and tweaks like that never bugged me. Oh, and Happy Birthday!

    MarieJ

  2. And that’s the thing–I think most “this new FB stinks” posts are knee-jerk reactions people post when they have a bit of trouble finding something they were using. After you have a bit to adapt, this new site design seems kind of nifty to me.

  3. It’s me, Frank. Actually, my biggest problem is I wake up this morning and everything is different. No warning, no pre-change buzz. Yes, it is free, but I am certain FB is making money off of my information some way – I mean, I type in that the new FB is a pain in the butt and immediately get an ad about Preparation H. My reaction is not knee-jerk – I am genuinely annoyed that there was no warning. Life will go on – I will use the product because it has no serious challengers, and in a few months I will complain again that it changed with no warning, from reall annoyance. (There, I feel better now).

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