High profile
Facebook has given users' profiles a face lift with a new layout and features to group friends, disclose more personal information and boost the presence of photos to make profiles more visually stimulating, but already people want the old look back.
A user's profile will now succinctly list their ‘basic' personal information, with a selection of the most recently tagged photos of them on show, according to an official blog by Josh Wiseman.
Also pushing photos to the fore is an ‘infinite scroll' feature, designed to make it faster for users to browse photos.
The presence of photos whether of friends or interests has been boosted across the profile to make it less wordy. As well as making profiles more visual, the other main thrust of Facebook's changes seems to be streamlining processes to make friends and contacts easier to find.
Peter Deng, a Facebook product manager told Tech Crunch: "Some of the most popular features and information has been a pain to find - the ‘View more photos' link, for example, is immensely popular, but it's been nestled between far less important links for years."
The revamped profiles builds on Facebook's recent addition of the ‘Groups' feature- which allows a user to send updates or messages to a personally selected group of people.
Wiseman said: "You can now highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your family, best friends or teammates. Create new groups of friends, or feature existing friends lists." A Friends page has also been added to let people search out new or old friends in various ways.
The last major change is a way for people to get more specific about their interests and activities.
Gone is the 'Info' page that lists users' interests- the tab looks different with images replacing the words as well as a way of people listing more about their job such as individual tasks they have worked on.
Wiseman said: "You can list the projects you worked on at your job, classes you took in school, your favorite musicians and sports teams, and more...All your interests and experiences are now represented with images, making your entire profile a more compelling visual experience."
So basically, it would appear that all of these features already exist on ‘old Facebook' albeit in a simplier form and the social network has not been reinventing the wheel. It might be fair to say that standard features have been tweaked, reorganised and prettified for ‘new' profiles, although privacy protestors might argue it is easier than ever for a user to post more personal information on the profile potentially for all to see.
Here is an example of the new profile layout.
