"Facebook revamping home page; Changes will give users more choice" by Associated Press | March 5, 2009
NEW YORK - The popular online hangout Facebook is revamping its home page and plans other changes so its millions of users can more easily choose the types of information they see.
Perhaps taking a cue from Twitter, the rising service for letting people express themselves in 140 characters or less and keep up with what celebrities have to say, Facebook said yesterday it will let users follow public figures like President Obama, swimmer Michael Phelps, bands like U2, and even institutions like The New York Times.
Related: I Don't Trust Twitter
And now I have even more reasons not to. PROMOTING the MSM while being PROMOTED by the MSM? Sorry, but my experience along those lines has been baaaaaaaddd! Hope you got what you wanted.
And I guess I'm just a dinosaur for being here reporting like I do, so why bother?
Facebook's fan pages currently work as static destination sites for anything from bacon to Coca-Cola to Jane Austen. The social-networking site will eventually make them work more like profiles, which individuals can now continuously update by posting photos, links, and other tidbits.
"As more and more information flows through Facebook, the need for people to easily discover the most recent and relevant content has grown," founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post.
Less than 140 characters right, so there is never enough context?
Beginning Wednesday, Facebook will also launch a redesigned home page that lets users receive continuous updates from their friends instead of every 10 or 15 minutes.
It is also adding filters so people can choose which of their friends to keep up with and which to silence, limiting news from tiresome or annoying acquaintances you don't necessarily want to "de-friend."
Well, you can ALREADY DO THAT, and you can also do it by NOT GETTING ON THERE in the FIRST PLACE and SAVE YOURSELF the ASS-SPYING, DATA-MINING TROUBLE!!!!!!!!!!!
Currently, people can choose to receive less information about certain friends but can't silence them completely. With the changes, users will even be able to filter updates so they only see photos or videos, for example.
Hey, the world ain't perfect.
Facebook will also tweak its central feature, the status update, which now invites people to broadcast to their friends a response to "What are you doing right now?" Responses can now range from mundane to poetic to uncomfortably personal.
The new question - "What's on your mind?" - may encourage users to dig deeper and post more entertaining updates than "Kevin is updating Facebook." In hopes of avoiding complaints that followed past redesigns, the company posted a preview of the changes yesterday and invited feedback.
My feedback: THIS
In a conference call with reporters, Facebook executives did not spend a lot of time on the business side of the changes, though Zuckerberg noted the site is moving in a direction where brands can interact with people. Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst with eMarketer, said Facebook has been "very aggressive in trying to rethink what advertisers can do, and more importantly, how they can interact with consumers."
Implanting a data-mining bug up our asses in now "interacting with consumers," huh?
--more--"
Also see: Facebook Facial
