If you hate the new Facebook changes right now, you’re really going to hate what Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning at the annual f8 conference in San Francisco. The Facebook that you know and love will be gone, and those irritating minor changes will be here to stay—plus many, many before. Basically, Facebook is getting an overhaul that coincides with a shift from user growth to user engagement. The last five years have been focused on signing people up and getting connections in place, and now that Facebook has half a billion users, the only thing left to do is get those users to share more.
If you hate the new Facebook changes right now, you’re really going to hate what Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning at the annual f8 conference in San Francisco. The Facebook that you know and love will be gone, and those irritating minor changes will be here to stay—plus many, many before. Basically, Facebook is getting an overhaul that coincides with a shift from user growth to user engagement. The last five years have been focused on signing people up and getting connections in place, and now that Facebook has half a billion users, the only thing left to do is get those users to share more.
Your Profile: “The Heart of your Facebook Experience”
The way Zuckerberg sees it, the more you share, the closer you get to your authentic identity. Your profile, the “heart of your Facebook experience,” needs to allow you to express yourself fully. “People feel an intense ownership over their profile,” he said. “It’s a really personal product.”
Umm. Product? Zuckerberg, please don’t call our lives products. We’ve known all along that that’s how you view us, but it hurts to hear it out loud.
Offensive word choice aside, the new Facebook is neat. A little creepy, but neat. If you compare your current profile to the first 5 minutes of conversation with a stranger (my name is Joe, I work at a bookstore, I really like cheese), the new profile is the next few hours of an in-depth, engaging conversation.
Your profile will look different too, with a large cover photo splashed across the top of your page. You’ll still have a profile pic, but your cover photo can be a photo of absolutely anything. In Zuckerberg’s profile, it’s his dog. Shocking. The entire profile will be more visual, making it easier to learn real things about someone without having to read a ridiculous list of activities that includes things like toe-socks and cheese.
Your Timeline: “Curate the Stories of your Life”
Thanks to a little thing called Timeline, your whole life will be out in the open, not hidden behind some “Older Posts” link. Millions of users have spend years “curating the stories of their lives” and it doesn’t make sense to have those stories just disappear into the depths of Facebook. With Timeline, the most important stories from your life will be highlighted, focused on and displayed on one page. You can click on a year and go back in time, and you can even add content to pre-Facebook years, like photos from your 2nd grade spelling bee or the time you shaved your cat when your parents weren’t looking.
The Ticker: “A Socially-Acceptable Way to Share Lightweight Information”
Iif you’re wondering about that list of ultra-lame activity on the upper righthand corner, it’s called a Ticker. When people want to share things that are super annoying (“lightweight material, as Facebook calls it), it gets stuffed in the Ticker. Embrace it. It will improve your life.
Apps: “Frictionless Experiences, Real-Time Serendipity and Finding Patterns”
Apps got a huge social makeover too. They’re now another form of expression that appears in the Timeline—in more than a “Momma needs 3 more chickens to complete her poultry dynasty” kind of way. Zuckerberg calls it “frictionless experiences, real-time serendipity and finding patterns in friends’ activities,” but this is what it boils down to: Friends are always doing awesome things, but they don’t have a good way to share them with you.
Now, if your friend is listening to a song on Spotify, it’ll appear in her Timeline. Click on the song and you can listen to it too. If your friend is watching a movie on Netflix, you can watch it with them. Discover what your friends are reading, eating, wearing and playing. You can always choose what the app publishes to your Timeline, so if you’re embarrassed about watching A Walk To Remember—again—nobody has to know.
But a few words from Zuckerberg: “If your timeline doesn’t contain the things that are important to you (cooking, running, or whatever), it’ll be an incomplete picture of you.” You’ve been warned.
The Facebook peeps also mentioned stuff like making apps (really easy) and optimizing them in real-time (also really easy), which lost them about 20,000 viewers (out of 100,000 or so). I don’t blame them. All of the super-exciting announcements were over and all that was left was a room full of people dressed in jeans, t-shirts and blazers. People who didn’t laugh at any of Zuckerberg’s jokes. Awkward.
The beta version of the new Facebook starts now and it’ll be rolled out over the next few weeks. Excited? I am. When it comes to change, go big or home. With so many new features, people will be forced to learn how to use them. And then they might love them. Who knows?
