Some Scattered Thoughts on Facebook's New Re-Design
Yesterday was the first day that Facebook rolled out of beta their new re-design. I’ve been able to play with the site for the past two days. My buddy, Bigi, first solicited me for some thoughts about the re-design when it was in beta on only viewable to users if they manually enter in the URL. My feedback: I emphasized that it was too confusing and they are going to make it a lot harder on new users to understand all the functionality. Granted this was when they only had a few layouts available and functional.
Although I still think the learning curve is a lot higher now for new users, my thoughts on the layout, now that it’s out of beta, have changed a bit. Facebook have organized the content a lot better with this re-design. My complaint? Only one - The Wall. At least for this public release, the quick link Wall-to-Wall functionality has disappeared between the home user and his/her friend. It makes it a lot more difficult to see my wall conversation with said friend.
The re-design is great for Facebook and I believe the re-design will:
1) Allow for Facebook to scale easier as they role out more neat features;
I see a start of an iGoogle-type in the profile page. I see Twitter-type functionality there, too. Right below that, I see FriendFeed comment-enabled functionality. Couple tabs over, I see a Flickr-type functionality… This is nothing new from what they had previously. But, they made a great effort to put it in front of the user’s face. And I think it will be effective in getting users to creative more content with their aggressive placement of those functionalities.
2) Allow for a lot more ad space/opportunity to work with with the wider layout;
The extra 200 or so pixels means extra ad space! The original design didn’t account much for monetization and that was okay. They needed to prove the concept and win over users. Now, with $496M of investors’ money, the design makes a whole lot of sense. Typical rectangle and square banner ads can be added now.
3) Affect third party applications — viralness will be a lot tougher.
This layout move will probably affect third party developers the most. They lose the visibility on the profile page to promote their application(s). They get buried in the “Boxes” page. Most likely, third party developers will have to rely solely on newsfeed activity for any promotion of their application. This won’t be so bad with the already established players like Slide, RockYou, Zynga, SGN, etc. because since they already have their applications out to the masses, they own the 600 px. canvas page in which they can build their own viral-abled promotion of their own applications within one application. But, for the new players… good luck.
The biggest possible impact, though, is that with the expanded layout, Facebook now can take advantage of all the traction the developers have built up the past year. From what I recall, the rules state that developers own the 600 px. wide canvas, but Facebook owns the space outside of the 600 px. width. Well, Facebook just increased their ad space by 50% and move themselves to a more effective location on the layout — the right side. Great job, Facebook. Let’s see what else they have in store for us — Facebook Day! Developer Conference is tomorrow. :)
