Proud Farmville users and compulsive status updaters need not worry — Facebook’s look may be changing, but its features will remain the same.
This past week, Facebook — which has over 400 million active users worldwide — has introduced a site redesign to 80 million of its users. Redesign for all users is expected to occur over the next few months, according to Inside Facebook, a blog dedicated to the site.
Students and faculty differ in opinion on the changes made to the site and their effects on Facebook’s role in social media.
From a “cynical” stance, “they [Facebook creators] fear people will get bored and go away,” said Al Filreis, Kelly Family professor of English and faculty director of the Kelly Writers House.
From a “charitable” perspective, “they want to keep current and they want to improve,” he added.
Filreis, who has not yet received the new Facebook layout, has seen the new home page design and welcomes the idea of change to Facebook.
“If one argued against change in the Internet, it would be … hypocritical,” he said. “The Internet is all about change.”
Facebook has implemented various changes in the past, including the “like” feature, Facebook usernames, Facebook Chat, updated privacy settings and 75 language translations — all since 2008.
The purpose of Facebook’s most recent redesign is “to improve navigation to and discovery of commonly used features,” Facebook engineer Jing Chen wrote on the site’s blog. These features include notifications, messages, events, photos and Facebook Chat, all of which are now situated in “dashboards” on the top and left-hand side of users’ homepages.
“It doesn’t really bother me,” College junior David Yáñez said. “It just takes a couple of days to get used to, but usually the changes are good.”
On the other hand, some students find the redesign to be unnecessary.
“Maybe it’s because I’m not very familiar with it yet,” Wharton junior Lucy Wang said, “but I haven’t really seen all the benefits.”
Wang noted that people are often “hesitant” to accept changes because Facebook is a social network used by many on a daily basis. “Once they get used to something, it’s difficult to change,” she added.
Filreis supports change on the web and is less concerned with how it comes about. “I’m interested in driving this fast car down the Internet highway and not that interested in looking under the hood.”
