People are annoyed with Facebook, and are trying to run away from social networking. All thanks to the Facebook’s news feed revamp, which has left users not just annoyed, but also confused and clueless. When I logged in to Facebook today, I saw a boatload of friends posting and commenting, Hate the new design”, “dislike news feed”, “complicated”, “Facebook gets shitter” and more such messages.
Facebook rolled out some major changes to the news feed, which breaks it down into two columns – top stories and recent posts, and also included a new ticker-like column with live updates from friends on the right-had side of the page. These changes come only one week after Facebook announced improved friend list capabilities.
Certainly these changes could have served as improvementsto the social network only if Facebook had made it simple and easy to understand. The changes have drawn a lot of complaints as users on Facebook are creating pages and communities to express their annoyance, with most of the complaints pertaining to “confusion” and messy.
Facebook has implemented the new Ticker, which basically emulates Twitter’s real-time messages and updates. Earlier in August, Facebook was testing this feature, and rolled it out to an increasing number of users. However, the feedback that Facebook got was negative, but looks like it hasn’t taken it seriously, and has gone ahead to make it available to all users. Nevertheless, you can hide the ticker or the sidebar by simply clicking the arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the page.
The other feature that came along was the Lists, inspired from Google+ Circles, which lets you organize your friends into groups like Family, Colleagues, Close Friends, and so on. It is also planning to roll out the Subscribebutton, similar to Twitter, which will allow you to -
- Choose what you see from people in News Feed
- Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
- Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends
From the above new features, it looks like Facebook is trying to integrate features from other networking sites. This however isn’t really a good step taken by Facebook, but rather an unwantedone. Users are already annoyed with the new features, and finding ways to disable it or get back to old Facebook news feed.
A trick that allowed users to get back the old news feed was by changing the preferred language to English (UK). However, a fix is being rolled out by Facebook and this trick is not working anymore. Although Facebook users are annoyed about the new features, it still continues to grow, with over 750 million users and counting. Recently, Facebook crossed the 1 trillion page views mark, making it the first ever website to cross the milestone.
