After the billionth invitation to join the trillionth “We hate the New Facebook” group, I started to wonder if there were any groups for people like me that felt like the redesign was a measurably huge improvement.
On Digg, I posted a comment in response to an article that linked to one of the anti-redesign groups that explained why I felt the New Facebook was better. My comment got almost 170 diggs almost immediately and several other people commented to say that they agreed. Here’s what it said.
The new Facebook is a return to being organized and clean. What you call the “old Facebook” is actually more like the “Facebook wearing a MySpace mask.” Anybody who misses the days when Facebook provided an actual alternative to the super chaotic, cluttered mess of MySpace should be happy with the new Facebook, and all the people that are happy with the “old Facebook” should just admit that they like MySpace more anyway. While all the popular kids pat themselves on the back for opting for incredibly bloated profile pages that take an hour to decipher and scroll through because of having a trillion applications littered throughout, the rest of us will have our cake and eat it too by separating the actual profile page from the apps page with the clever/obvious/overdue use of tabs.
However, I agree that they should let each user choose which layout they want since your choosing to keep using a MySpace clone does not affect my choosing to go back to something that tries to be less hectic.
P.S. Anybody who actually thinks that dividing content into a tabbed layout is maze-like is being silly. Tabs are good. MySpace is not.
So last night, I got yet another invitation to join an anti-redesign group, and that was the last straw. I opened up Illustrator and Photoshop, tried to make a clever banner, and started a group called The New Facebook is Way Better.
I’m actually not crazy about Facebook. It seems like most people are on the site more than me. I’m just frustrated by all the people saying they hate the redesign because to me, it’s clearly better, and maybe it’s because I’m a full-blown Digital Arts and Communication major that it bugs me to see so many popular kids decide to worship a terrible design and bash a good one just to try to be hip and rebellious.
I hope you will join and help us be more visible. And if you’re one of the people that joined any of the anti-redesign groups because a friend sent you an invitation, I hope you’ll reconsider (bonus points if you get the person that sent you the invitation to reconsider as well).
Last night, I stayed up until 3:30 AM to do an eleven-page heuristics analysis on the Ubuntu web site, which I’d been unable to start until then because of a rather inconvenient technical problem that threw a wrench in my plans. Later that morning, I woke up at 6:30, caught a bus across town to make it to my User Experience class, and gave a presentation on it that lasted somewhere between fifteen to twenty minutes. I went first, and the instructor loved me.
I actually enjoyed the analysis and the presentation, but I definitely did not enjoy feeling exhausted to the point of being constantly distracted by that dull I’m-so-tired-I-could-die body pain and the weight of my own head. All I could think about was how bad I felt, and all I could do was assure myself that I’d get some real sleep soon and tell myself not to feel sorry for myself since every other college student on Earth has had days exactly like this. Dumb body. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was just annoying, exactly like a whiny kid in my skull that kept asking for the same thing and making the same complaints over and over.
After getting some groceries (cookies, iced tea, triscuits, and more cookies), I took a bus back to get lunch, only to find that the back right side of my jaw was so randomly messed up and swollen on the inside that it hurt too much to eat. When I touched it from the outside in a certain spot, it felt like a little pocket would burst on the inside. Weird. I had to eat with my head sideways and could only use the left side of my mouth to chew because for whatever reason, that made it feel at least a little better. I probably looked silly.
Next, I took another bus across town for my Sketching for Communication class, which was three and a half hours of maddening frustration. The instructor is very friendly and knows how to be constructive and encouraging at the same time, but the rate at which I’ve been forced to improve my drawing abilities has hardly been stress free, and I don’t get too much satisfaction out of my work because it’s all such boring material (cubes, cones, cylinders, spheres, and lots of shading).
With my classes all done for the week, I finally got to relax and eat dinner. The inside of my jaw didn’t feel swollen anymore, and it didn’t hurt to eat. It’s still a little bit sore if I touch it in a certain spot, but whatever it was that messed up my mouth was pretty much gone already. Weird.
Finally, I watched a movie back in my dorm room and played Spore for a while. I would have gone straight to sleep except that I was having a little bit of a second-wind. Typical that this little bit of energy should come only now that I’m done with classes, but what’s done is done, and I’m just happy to be able to unwind a little bit. Tonight, I will sleep well.
