Burson-Marsteller Crossmedia

Picture this – new developments from Facebook

von Mark Howells-Mead

Back in 2008, Facebook caused a huge surge in negative feedback when they decided to re-structure the interface and layout of their pages. (See this newspaper article from September 2008 as a reference.) The fuss was mainly caused because many felt that the user interaction was made less intuitive and that many features, which had been gaining in popularity at the time, were suddenly moved or hidden. In comparison to simplified services like Friendfeed or Twitter, the new Facebook structure was bemoaned by many users as being a step back in terms of ease of use.

Screenshots which have surfaced in the last couple of days at Facebook show the next iteration of the user interface, which appears at first glance to be a massive improvement on the current version. The changing nature in which users want to use social media tools is reflected and the systems developers at Facebook have learned a lot, both from their own users and from the use of communicative interfaces like Twitter and Flickr. The new home page will be based on the timeline structure of conversational sites like Twitter, but brings additional multimedia features to the fore. Bearing in mind that Facebook already has more photos online than monster photo sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket, multimedia appears to be one of the central focus points (sic) of the next phase of Facebook’s development. By offering (and continuing to push) the media sharing aspect of their system, Facebook are accelerating in the race to become the go-to resource for online social interaction and file sharing. I can see that I will be sharing many more snapshot-type photos online there… as long as the management team can properly resolve the recent issues surrounding user copyrights.

If one bears in mind that use of the Facebook system continues to be free, there is little doubt that other services will see a hit when the new version of Facebook comes online. There is also little doubt that the nay-sayers will have their few weeks of moaning about the changes, before everything settles down again and people get used to the new system. As a Facebook user myself, I will be very happy if the technical status is improved: the correlation between the home page list of my friends’ activities rarely correlates with the Friends page and that can be quite annoying. When I log in, I want to see an overview of what’s been happening, from friends sharing photos to people updating their status. A new and improved filtering system will help those with endless lists of contacts to keep track of who is doing what, and where.

If the new version of Facebook can continue to meet and exceed the expectations of its users, while making major steps forward in terms of multimedia sharing and ease of use, then it will stand alongside Google as one of the true giants of the modern internet: perhaps even surpassing Google through an open and discursive attitude towards its users.

The new, upcoming version of Facebook

Geschrieben von Mark Howells-Mead am 5. März 2009 um 12:21 | Permalink

Tags (Schlagworte): facebook, file sharing, interface, internet, multimedia, new version, social media, user interaction

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