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A Facebook group formed for those opposed to the site's new design is
nearing 2.7 million supporters, and the leaders are organising a
two-day boycott to bring their point across.
The group, called "1,000,000 against the new Facebook layout" has
greatly exceeded the expectations in its title and is encouraging its
supporters to stay off Facebook during the weekend of October 18 and 19.
It's not the only Facebook group created to protest the new design,
which, according to Facebook, has now become the default for almost all
of its members. Another group called "Petition Against the New
Facebook" has more than 1.6 million backers, while the group "I hate
the new Facebook" has 1.5 million supporters.
It's likely that there is a lot of overlap among these groups'
supporters, but if the largest group contains all of those opposed to
the new design, that's still a significant number of unhappy members.
Facebook has 100 million active users.
Facebook has been monitoring these groups, tracking the complaints and
reaching out to some of the leaders, a spokeswoman for the company
said. Facebook is receptive to feedback from its members, values their
enthusiasm for the site and is taking their suggestions into account
for future design improvements, she said.
Jessica Fishbein, a high school teacher who is one of the
administrators of the group with more than 2.6 million backers, begs to
differ.
"Facebook, which normally cared about the feedback of people, just made
this decision, didn't really care what the users thought and isn't
really responding to feedback," she said in an interview. "People are
very upset."
Fishbein said that neither she nor the group's other administrator had
been contacted by Facebook, although Fishbein has written to the
company with links and information about the group and asking for help.
She said she and her fellow administrator had to oust the group's
creator after he tried to profit from its massive popularity for
commercial reasons. Indeed, they haven't been able to scrub his
commercial pitch from the group description, despite asking Facebook
for help, she said.
Fishbein, like many redesign critics, dislikes the new tabbed interface
because she feels it forces people to do too much clicking around to
see and find things. She preferred the more consolidated look and feel
of the old design. She also finds the overall effect of the new design
to be "very in-your-face," whereas the previous layout was, in her
view, less strident and more discreet.
Fishbein realises that Facebook is unlikely to revert to its old
design, but she feels the company could earn a lot of points with its
members if it acknowledges the main criticisms and makes modifications.
"The goal is to send a strong signal to Facebook. For every person that
takes the time to join this group, there are more out there who are
upset," said Fishbein, who has been a Facebook user for about two years
and is administrator of another group devoted to ending hate speech.
Fishbein said it would be good to give members the option to toggle
back and forth between the old and new interfaces, as it did for about
two months between July and September. However, the Facebook
spokeswoman said that this is unfeasible for technical reasons. It
would make it complicated and cumbersome for Facebook and for
developers who create applications for the site, she said.
Since early this year, Facebook tried to keep its members informed
about its redesign plans and asked for input via a section on the site
called Facebook Profiles Preview. The company has said it took into
account feedback from members when developing the redesign.
Among Facebook's goals with the new design were to reduce the clutter
of members' profile pages and restore the social network's clean and
organised layout. The company also wanted to make the site's activity
feed features more prominent and easier to use.
To these ends, the redesign redistributed profile components to
different tabs and increased the prominence of the Wall feature, where
members and their friends can post comments, broadcast action updates
and post links and photos, among other things.
Members interested in learning more about the new design and sending
Facebook feedback on it can do so via the site's Help section. The
Facebook Profiles Preview page is also still active, the spokeswoman
said.
Facebook is no stranger to complaints. When first introduced, the
activity feed feature was blasted by users as violating their privacy,
as was the Beacon ad program that broadcast actions made outside of the
site by Facebook's users to their friends. With this redesign, some
external developers complained that the redesigned profile page would
steal visibility from their applications.
Source: computerworld.co.nz
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