The reaction to Facebook's new profile
Facebook has announced its New Profile and the range of improvements it plans to roll out in the coming months.
The news broke last night after the company's Josh Wiseman posted a blog and said: "Today I'm excited to introduce you to some improvements we've made to the Facebook profile, so now it's even easier for you to tell your story and learn about your friends."
What these improvements include is a New Introduction where basic information is more prominent on the profile page.
Then there's 'Featured Friends', so you can organise and display the people who are most important to you, i.e. family and best friends.
Next, there's 'New Experiences' where you can share your interests and activities on your profile page, making it more personal all-round.
There's also improved photos, including a new 'infinite scroll' feature which allows you to quickly browse through your photos.
And finally, the new Friends page means you can now find people quickly and easily, searching by name, hometown, school or a various other dimensions. Something I've felt has been desperately needed for some time.
You can of course implement the New Profile right now. As being part of a social media/PR agency, I've naturally upgraded my account. And looking at my new profile page, things have certainly changed.
But what has been the general reaction? Well, people never like change. Change is often frowned upon. People take it personally and expect things to stay the same. So this new Facebook profile has quite naturally been met with some negativity.
"No new Facebook sucks, no offence!" one person wrote. "Why do you guys always insist on changing something that already works fine?" said another. "Old is gold!" said someone else.
People hate change. But that's just the way the Internet works. Things are constantly evolving, improving, changing. Facebook is always experimenting and trying out new things. Naturally, they'll be thinking about their commercial interests and changing the site to retain its dominant global footing.
Many will resist and hate the new Profile page but will it push them away? Will they go elsewhere? Let's not forget the numbers here - if Facebook was a country, it would be the world's third largest. It's gigantic. It's huge. Love it or hate it, it's become a massive part of our social lives.
So these improvements might well be met with resistance at first, but they'll soon be embraced. Once people get used to them. And the attitude might well change in the long run when people realise how good the improvements really are.
Then again, they might not. And it may be the beginning of the end for Facebook. Unlikely. But it's possible.
Whatever happens, Facebook's changes are a good thing, in my opinion. Change is good, especially online. It's the beautiful thing about the web - constantly evolving to improve and grow. I give Facebook's new Profile a 'like' and so far, 16,000 people agree with me...
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