Facebook, aged 6.

Aww Facebook, how much you’ve grown since we first met… it seems like only yesterday that I first met you and we exchanged details about my relationship status and my school…

*ahem*

OK, I promised to write a quick post on my views regarding the new look Facebook, and so here it is! Pros, Cons and a quick Conclusion. I’ll be writing a more in depth post about what this new Facebook does, and why it does it, sometime before Monday…

Here goes!

PROS

• Obvious thing first: The new home page is a vast improvement over the old version, offering access to more information without having to change page, by selecting items from the tabs on the left.You are able to access Messages (formally known as Inbox),  Events, Photos and Friends from the side tabs, which load their respective content in the middle of the page (where the News Feed normally is).

  Further down is a tab for applications and games (as there is no longer an application tab on the notification bar).

  Having the main applications accessible on the home page means less time loading pages, and more time being able to view the content that you logged on to see.

  

  Tabs at the Side of the Home page.

• The Facebook Chat bar now only takes up the room that it NEEDS to.Having moved the applications tab and notifications menu, all that’s really left on the Chat bar is, well, chat. With this in mind, Facebooks designers have redesigned it so that it only takes up the room it needs to, and is docked to the left. This is particularly an advantage to people like me, who have a rather small vertical resolution (I’m using one of those newfangled 16:9 aspect ratio laptops – as opposed to the more common 16:10), meaning I can see more without scrolling.
• And my final Pro point, tabs at the top of the page (next to the facebook logo) are now the new home of Message previews, Friend Requests and Notifications (more on the notifications tab in the Cons section…) – and for the most part are an extremely convenient way to quickly check your messages and requests on facebook.

Cons

• Notifications… and boy, this is a big one in my book. I like to be able to tab into Facebook from whatever I was doing in another tab, and be able to know instantly whether or not I have any new notifications.In this new version of facebook, I can’t! If you aren’t already at the very top of a facebook page, you now can’t see the Notifications bubble like you used to be able to until you scroll up … maybe not the end of the world, until you take into account how un-obvious it STILL is when you find it…

  

• And finally, the search bar… I like the fact that facebook are really trying to push search in the new look facebook, however, it does seem a little… oddly placed. I’m not going to bother putting in a screenshot of this, all I want to say is that to me, having search in the right hand corner made sense, as all major browsers also have search in the corner… nevermind!

Conclusion

Facebook have made a great deal of changes, and in my opinion, have brought about a great change to facebook in general! From reading the pros and cons above you may have noticed that my cons are rather niggly small things, whereas the pros are actually big, and that’s actually true of the design in general – it’s more of what people want, and less of the things we don’t!

Nice.

Oh, and to those complaining – think about this: if facebook don’t change, someone else will do it better, and then we won’t use facebook. Remember myspace?

Popularity: 23% [?]