On Monday, July 21st, Facebook users began to see a balloon on their profile page asking to try the “new” Facebook.  The New Facebook featured a wider profile, with significantly less information on a single page. It also has different fonts and font sizes, with tabbed menus. It spreads the information over a few tabbed pages, rather than featuring all the info on one overfull page. Many were dismayed to see their beloved profile changed and moved around. However, Facebook decided to Trial-period the changes in order to avoid the outcry made when changes were immediately instituted, as with the newsfeed feature and the Beacon advertising platform. During the entire “trial period” users were asked for feedback and suggestions to improve the new Facebook.

On Wednesday, September 10, users were automatically redirected to the new Facebook, and the option to “Go back to the Old Facebook” disappeared. The old Facebook still existed on the servers for a few days, allowing clever users to thwart the new Facebook, but this ended when the old Facebook was deleted from the servers. Many users expressed their dismay in classic Facebook style: they made lots of groups, they made lots of petitions, and they threatened to leave. Many asked what was wrong with the old Facebook.

The change was made in reaction to the increasingly cluttered profiles. Since the introduction of applications and rearrangeable profile pages, Facebook has spiraled in complexity and addons, being compared the social networking site Myspace on numerous blogs. MySpace allows users to change their pages into wildly differing formats, with blinking text, images, and videos. Katie Geminder, Facebook’s director of user experience and design, was quoted in BusinessWeek as saying Facebook was becoming “more cluttered and harder for users to parse.”

This change has not been without hiccups, however. Many application developers are unhappy with the new design, which eliminated the link to recently used applications. The Developer Feedback Forum displays many of the complaints developers have, all related to the drop in users the new changes have resulted in. However, Facebook continues to tweak the design, and new changes are made everyday. As of this writing, Facebook has tweaked the application menu, quieting most of the developers concerns. It seems the new Facebook is still an ongoing release.

One wonders where Facebook is going. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, was quoted in the New York Times as saying he wants Facebook to be the new “Social Operating System”, taking the center of peoples lives on the computer, and offering applications to replace many ordinary programs. Evidently, he also plans to make good on his proposal: on July 28th he hired Mike Schroepfer as his new director of engineering. Schroepfer brings with him years of experience as the CTO of Sun Microsystems, and the VP of engineering at Mozilla, responsible for the wildly popular Firefox web Browser. With Schroepfer on board, it proves Zuckerberg is poised to take Facebook places. We can only see what Facebook has in store for us next.

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