Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

Looking at the same thing everyday isn’t exactly the best way to notice the nuances of its evolution. Like your face. Stand in front of a mirror and hold up a picture of yourself from five years ago and you’ll see what I mean. Change. It’s happening every minute, every day — we just don’t usually notice it. And when we do, we don’t like it much.

Now take your Facebook. The social media platform so popular that even your grandma’s on it has exemplified this paradigm all week. It’s been a big week at Facebook, but complaints haven’t stopped since our profile’s began displaying changes to how it’s been handling content flow in the News Feed, along with this sticky right-aligned thing people are calling a “Ticker.” Just for kicks, let’s do the mirror thing on Facebook. Open the site up in your browser (wait, who am I kidding, of course it’s already open in your browser tab next door), now click this link. See that? It’s called change, and it’s happening all the time, especially at Facebook. Just ask a developer, they’ll tell you.

Facebook probably makes small incremental changes to its interface everyday, but it’s hard to tell exactly how often because they’re small changes that are really only noticeable under the magnifying glass of time. Still, there have been plenty of new features requiring the PR team at Facebook to get the masses ready for big roll-outs that have changed the platform’s core functionality: the News Feed, Chat and Connect in 08, the Like button in 09, the re-ordering of your profile and the “photo strip” in late 2009 (or was that early 2010?) The birth of Places in 2010 and the death of Places not a year later in 2011, along with the quiet burial of horizontal Tabs. There’s been Questions, the Virtual Gift Shop, Credits, Lists, Groups, Pages, and Vanity URL’s introduced or depreciated during The Facebook’s climb to 750 million active users since 2004.

As I stated earlier, small quakes in Facebook’s functionality have been freaking us out all week, but today was the big one; the biggest change to Facebook’s fundamental behavior since 2007. So now you can add Timeline and Open Graph to the myriad of innovations listed above. Announced just hours ago, Mark Zuckerberg put on his headset today (September 22nd, 2011) and unveiled sweeping changes to the way we’ll interact with each other on Facebook at F8 this morning. Less profile, more timeline, and a play nice Open Graph that will allow us to incorporate our digital lives into Facebook’s API with ease. Data from the sources that make up the digital you, contextualized in a narrative format.

Why so scared? Tech blogs all over the place have been documenting the changes Facebook has undergone in detail since the beginning of the week, including today’s F8. But I think one of the more interesting sideline stories that has developed in light of all this new stuff is how resistant to change we are. Especially when it comes to something as fluid as the web. Ironically, Facebook itself has been used as one of the main vehicles to voice the hilarity and displeasure at the changes to our “homes on the web.” Whatever the case, like the “users” we are, we’ll all fall in line and stop complaining and start using, quickly forgetting what once was and recognizing the new as the same. Mark knows this, that’s probably one of the reasons for Timeline, so we can see how we’ve evolved digitally — visually and socially.

But if you’re really that miffed and you’d like to voice your displeasure at the changes Facebook has recently undergone you can join the Facebook group: We Hate The New Facebook, so STOP CHANGING IT!!! You better hurry though, Group’s are scheduled to be archived.

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