There are a countless amount of social networking Web sites designed to give people access to communication and information about friends right at one’s finger tips. The most popular site among these is Facebook. Facebook was established in February 2004 as a social network exclusive to college students. It included areas for students to post personal information about themselves, which includes their interests, favorite movies, television shows, music and school activities.
The site quickly evolved due to popularity making it accessible to all people not just college students. Along with changing the demographic, Facebook also regularly changed and added new features for users to take advantage of including tagging photos, groups and various applications. This rapid change has happened again just recently with the creation of what the site’s creators call New Facebook.
New Facebook has adapted many new features as well as “improved” the current features. For example, there are now tabs used to organize navigation. There is one for the general newsfeed as well as one for the live feed if you want up to the minute updates on your friends. There is also a tab displaying new photos your friends upload and are tagged in as well.
Another new feature that applies to the photos section is when a person clicks to view their friends’ photos, every photo that person is tagged in is displayed and their albums are at the bottom of the page. Finally there is a tab displaying posted items, which include videos, groups and fun wall, and posts that users wish to share with friends.
Most, if not all of the applications of Facebook have remained the same with the exception of some that were renamed. The difference is where the menu for them appears on the page. It appears in two places, on the bottom of the page on the grey strip where Facebook messenger is and in the top right hand corner where a person used to be able to change their status. That feature is now at the top center portion of the page.
With all of these differences the aspects of the site that remained the same are the place of the inbox and view friends features and the somewhat new Facebook messenger.
With the creation of the new layout has come a lot of feed back from users mostly who have negative feelings towards the new Facebook.
Many groups have been created protesting the new site. Two examples of these groups are ‘100,000+ To Bring Back the New Facebook’ and ‘We Don’t Like the New Facebook’. Both of these groups currently have over 100,000 members and keep growing everyday.
There are many reasons people are not responding well to the new Facebook. A main one is lack of familiarity of the new design. In regards to this first year student Sarah Harvey said, “It was simple. I was used to it.”
Not being familiar with the new design has caused frequent users like senior Dan Feigelstein a great deal of frustration.
“Well, it’s organized in a way that frustrates users because now it’s harder to find what you’re looking for. Normally, I’m cool with change, but when you do that to a frequently used website, then everyone has to relearn where everything is,” Feigelstein said.
With all of commotion coming from the negative end of the spectrum there lay the people who prefer the new layout and those who choose to remain indifferent.
“I actually like the new Facebook. It’s more organized and I think it looks better,” Arielle Long, third year student said.
“I like to quickly be able to view the new newsfeed because it’s not just chronological.
It correlates everything together,” Greg Rice said, computer science professor.
Despite the entire backlash the new Facebook has gotten people have not chosen to shy away from the site and instead adapted to it.
First year student Paige F. said, “Facebook has a lot of new features, but I could get used to it.”
Sam Greenberg is a second-year student majoring in English. She can be reached at SG655862@wcupa.edu.