A mea culpa of sorts was issued Tuesday by Facebook, as the recent redesign of the popular social-networking site has been met with extreme criticism and backlash from users.
Product director Christopher Cox "apologized" on the company's blog, indicating that Facebook would focus on four specific problematic areas of the new design that users have given the most feedback about.
Cox mentioned several improvements to the new "stream" of Facebook, including adding photo tags of friends and having more options to filter out unwanted content.
Common complaints of the two-week-old design have been that the site looks extraordinarily cluttered, with many of the old "news feed" features taking a backseat to the new "stream."
Users of the site had bombarded the company with complaints, posting comments on Facebook's official blog and elsewhere across the Web.
The blog Valleywag indicated that the new design of Facebook could be attributed to founder Mark Zuckerberg's paranoia that Twitter could sneak up behind Facebook and "zoom past it" - much like Facebook did to MySpace.
Valleywag also indicated that Zuckerberg is close with ex-Facebook executive Matt Cohler, who now works at Benchmark Capital, a venture-capital firm that holds a $230 million investment in Twitter.
He also serves as a paid special advisor to Zuckerberg, a situation that has "Facebook's top executives . fuming," according to Owen Thomas of Valleywag. Facebook tried and failed to purchase Twitter last year for $500 million.
Zuckerberg has also been criticized for the purported e-mail he sent to Facebook employees last Friday, saying that users had no idea what they were talking about and should not be listened to.
Regardless of the conspiracy-like theories behind the site's new design, the company's acknowledgement of users' distaste comes after more than one million users voted "no" in a poll on Facebook about whether they liked the new changes.
Sentiments among Penn students on Facebook appeared to fall in line with the majority.
"Why fix something when it isn't broken?" Wharton sophomore Mike Jarrell asked. "I didn't have any problems with the old layout, and there was no need to change it," he said.
The display of everyone's happenings everywhere on the site makes Wharton sophomore Theresa Breitton think that perhaps Facebook should adopt a new slogan, she said.
"The new Facebook is basically stalking made easy," she said.
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