Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Rolls Out Redesigned Profile Pages
alphadogg writes "The [Facebook Profile] changes include a clustered listing of biographical information under the user name at the top of the page, including such details as the person's job, hometown, relationship status, where they went to college, what languages they speak and birthdate. Beneath that will appear a set of the five most recent photos that a user allows to be posted at their profile page." The changes unsurprisingly are being met with mixed opinions ranging from rage to anger.
The latest five pictures will be totally useless for me because a lot of my friends tag a picture with my name if they think I would interested in it rather than because its a picture of me!
Not really.
They should also edit the last line to read, "The changes unsurprisingly are being met with mixed opinions ranging from rage to complete apathy."
apparently facebook doesn't support Opera? I visit it using this web browser all the time but when I click the link to facebook in the summary it tells me that facebook isn't cool enough to support Opera. Weird.
Eat sleep die
More predictable semantic information which can be used in to collect more information about the users. Hooray!
Otherwise known as 'ranger'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So now facebook is the new google, extremely minor changes are finding place on tech news sites.
Is facebook really technology? From what i can figure out, its a place where people spend 700 billion minutes a month playing farville and mafia wars.
I'd rather have all the facebook employees working on something significant, like i dunno, developing software for the space missions, or heck, even search engines. Search engines are awefully complicated - facebook is just a photo album with lots of cookies to track you.
At what point do we realize that people wasting time on such sites is as big a danger as say, drugs?
When's the war on facebook ?
http://www.facebook.com/common/browser.php isn't compatible with Firefox 4, IE 9, or Chromium 6
"Don't hate the media, become the media." -Jello Biafra
They moved around a few things. It doesn't make any difference to me.
"The changes unsurprisingly are being met with mixed opinions ranging from rage to anger" That's what they always say, a few days later, the cries dim out. Humans tend to resist change.
I just wish Diaspora was finished so I could send an invitation to the few FB friends who matter to join me there and then delete my FB page.
I quite like it. It's nice and simple.
My Journal
That was first reported at least two years ago.
... automatic security preference "accidental" changes begin.
So many people just accept these upgrades without going back and checking their privacy settings again.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
... so far, at least. My profile is just the same as yesterday. Only when I clicked on a friend's profile did I see the change.
There was a button I could click to follow suit, but I ignored it.
Yep - it's on the front page of CNN, too.
Next we get to find out what Zuckerberg found between his teeth yesterday. Stay tuned!
Fucking losers. Facebook is so 2009.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well yeah, it turns out of you post anything worthwhile your hosts drop you, you get DDOSed, the US gov't wants to throw you in jail and Swedish women say you raped them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
People got over the FARK.com redesign, and they got over Slashdot 2.0. They'll get over this as well, and forget to check their privacy settings.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
The changes unsurprisingly are being met with mixed opinions ranging from rage to anger.
Rage to anger.... That doesn't seem to be much of a range, or even mixed for that matter... Range and anger are basically synonymous in my book... That is strange wording.
Didnt everyone hate 'the wall'? Just as much?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
No! The feeling ranged from rape to angered ....
you sir have my imaginary mod points
insight through the mind
Er.. what is Facebook actually??
Justin? Is that you? How come you turned down my friend request?
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
60 Minutes even covered this last night. What blew my mind was the fact that they had 12 "engineers" working full time to build this new profile page. If the data and backend systems are logically designed then this redesign should be very easy. So either these "engineers" are low skilled or their systems are a mess.
Developers: We can use your help.
They fixed some compatibility issues it seems. I still use Firefox 2 and Facebook looked so "broken" it was pathetic, now it's almost all correct. Funnily they dropped some web 2.0 features, the page reloads entirely when you check another in-page tab. The ads are invading but the design overall is better. First time they actually improve something, at least in my books. But of course, it still is just the same old useless Facebook we could all live without...
Doesn't say how long they were working on it for. Plus, they didn't change it globally, it's an opt-in thing so a little more complex than just changing everyone's profile (though not by much).
The fact that it's optional means that nobody should be whining here. Obviously they're fed up of people bitching about all the changes and have decided to give them the choice this time.
which is totally what she said
Justin? Is that you? How come you turned down my friend request?
Perhaps because you wanted to talk to Julian, not Justin?
Browse friendships on the new profile is just downright creepy. I know it's all visible info, but I can't think of a single non-creepy reason anyone would want to click and see every interaction between two other people.
If you were looking at the results for two people, and one of the people you were looking up walked up behind you, you'd try to hide it before they caught you. There really isn't a good explanation you could give them if they saw you doing it.
It appears to me a tool designed exclusively for stalkers, is there any other reason it exists? I'm really at a loss to figure out why this wasn't rejected the second it was suggested and the person suggesting it isn't avoided like the plague at the office.
This sentence no verb.
As it turns out, the friends that matter to you will continue to stay in touch with you even if you are not on Facebook.
Palm trees and 8
Five most recent profile pics visible to whom, friends or strangers? I know some people who use landscapes or cartoons as their "public" profile pic, and relied on FB access control model to prevent non-friends from seeing the other profile pictures. Now I bet a lot of people will delete their extra profile pics. Then FB's policy will be to delve into the database of deleted items until their year of use is up and declare deleted items "public".
I try to keep Slashdot as close to the original as possible. I keep Javascript disabled, and when the admins tried to reenable it for me, I disabled it again.
Palm trees and 8
An AC mentioned this already, that link is simply the page you're redirected to if you use an incompatible browser.
Particularly the "Question only you know the answer to".
That has the range from "First grade teacher" through "Pet's name" all the way over to "Street you lived on when you were 8".
Is anyone in Facebook HQ aware that about 90% of their users use it to communicate or get back in touch with the very group of people who would know those answers - BECAUSE THEY ANSWERED THE SAME QUESTION THE SAME WAY?!
Hello! Your entire first grade class had the same teacher. Your friends know the name of your pets and the street you lived on. Your cousins sure as hell know the rest of the questions like mother's maiden name etc.
Why not just give everyone the default code of 0000 or 12345? It's about the same level of security.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Wait, so, if I post something significant I will effectively have what amounts to an official government acknowledgment of the fact that I had sex with multiple sexy blonde Swedish women?
On an entirely unrelated note, I happen to have here a classified document that was sent to me via registered mail...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Neither does Chrome.
When I saw the Diaspora guys putting a blank page and telling users to "get a real browser" when navigating with IE, I thought it was bad taste on their part to willingly shove away potential users. Seeing this sh**head page from Fecesbook, I now completely understand their position -- although I believe they shouldn't be fighting sh**headedness with more sh**headedness.
Doesn't say how long they were working on it for. Plus, they didn't change it globally, it's an opt-in thing so a little more complex than just changing everyone's profile (though not by much).
The fact that it's optional means that nobody should be whining here. Obviously they're fed up of people bitching about all the changes and have decided to give them the choice this time.
I can't find a source for the life of me (although I remember reading it), so take the following with a grain of salt, but as I understand things it is currently opt-in and will eventually become permanent for all persons.
It's a godawful jumble to be honest.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
That's it! I'm going back to Geocities!
To be fair, I doubt that the majority of the time was spent on actual coding. I imagine a lot of it was spent on things like UI design (positioning the graphics, buttons, etc.) and aesthetics.
Judging from the result I can't help but wonder if FB just gave the team a year's supply of whiskey.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
It's a problem with TFA's link, not Facebook.
Dilbert RSS feed
Yes, because being accused of having sex with multiple sexy blond Swedish women is just as enjoyable as having actually HAD said sex...NOT!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Facebook now forgets that you actually used https to login or show a page. All links are now without https. Tested in Fx and Chrome.
The last line was met with mixed opinions ranging from pedantry to grammar naziism.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
It's a godawful jumble to be honest.
Is there any part of Facebook that isn't? I've always found their UI and particularly their site navigation to be confusing.
Developers: We can use your help.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/
the man who doesn't own a television and in pure narcissism tells this fact to anyone at the slightest chance
i am the same sort of laughable curmudgeon when it comes to facebook: i don't have a page, and never will, and proudly announce the fact to people whenever the subject of facebook comes up. i am the fringe weirdo, and i know it. and regardless of my level of narcissism, i am apparently also turning out to be wise. people are feeding facebook so much detail about their lives they are doing nothing than feeding a beast which makes privacy in their lives impossible
facebook is a future myspace/ friendster. give it a few years. simply as a matter of fact that facebook's business goals will make people more and more uncomfortable and more and more creeped out. yet facebook cannot back away from their business goals of exploiting and cashing in on the massive data stores about us that they are sitting on, because those server farms cost a heck of a lot to maintain. so as facebook rushes to fulfill the promise of their business plan, they will inevitably repulse and drive away their members
cantankerous weirdos like me who don't have a facebook account will begin to look cool again, prescient even. i promise i won't loudly bleat "i told you so" in 2013 when the latest slashdot story is about the decline of facebook
but here's the big thing: the phenomenon of social networking sites have a real world analogy: the hot club/ restaurant/ bar. take any metropolitan area, and you will have some nightlife hangouts that are THE place to be and be seen, some that are past their prime, and some that are up and coming. social networking sites are the online analogy of this continuous sociological process of rising and falling. after a certain amount of time as the "center of the world", a new dynamic takes places where a new "in" crowd begins to consider the hot hangout spot to be over the hill, declasse, tired, over. and they have a new little place where the "coolest of the cool" hang out. and then the exodus begins in earnest. soon the new place has lines out the door every night, the old place is empty. somehow everyone knows about the new place, and they all want to get in. the old place can't pay people to come. then a new "in" crowd rises... repeat ad nauseum. what's notable for those who would extend this analogy completely, is that there is subcultural rift lines. the internet is still young. maybe the future of social networking sites will fractionate according to those who identify themselves according to certain subcultural identifiers. well, that's true already to some extent
now if i were REALLY smart i'd be busy maneuvering around the next feature set that will make the next social networking site the "got to have it" place to put up your profile. and ride that pile of money to its bitter end. well, there's probably already about a hundred thousand zuckerberg wannabes out there doing exactly that already. 99% of those wannabes absolutely suck, but in that remaining 1%, all i know is, one of them will actually succeed
because facebook is jumping the shark, and the internet still needs an "it" social hangout spot. which site that will be... i wish i had that crystal ball
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If the data and backend systems are logically designed then this redesign should be very easy. So either these "engineers" are low skilled or their systems are a mess.
Even if its a mess - moving one link to another place is incredibly trivial - I can't imagine needing more than 2 people for a job like this, how they even managed to have 12 is absolutely beyond me. I work at a company where we deal with more complicated Data than Facebook, our backend is a bit of a mess, and we only have 5 programmers (one of which who acts as DBA, sometimes) to handle it all.
Seriously - it didn't cross the minds of 12 engineers that everyone who uses facebook has hated every single one of the UI changes - and they still continue to do it?
I think I could train a single monkey to do a better job than these guys. Simply because if I hand a monkey a computer, it'll take him a really long time to figure out how to publish any changes.
someone knew what they were doing. I have never seen so many of my friends update their non-current data that was now brought to the forefront. It's almost like they had a problem, nailed out some requirements, and properly engineered a solution.
insight through the mind
Yes. In fact, just a company changing it's logo on it's front page temporarily, when it does so almost every other day, is worthy of TWO news posts!
Specifically, Google changed it's logo to pac man and then people spent a lot of time playing pac man on google.
Oh, sorry, I forgot that we like google but hate facebook...
Building a Facebook profile page isn't hard. Building a Facebook profile page that has exactly the new features you want, designed in a reasonable way, and that doesn't cause the site to fall over when your 500 million monthly active users begin using it is rather more difficult.
Omnes stulti sunt.
Yeah, I'm not sure why this was national news. Surely there are more important things to cover than some website.
It makes me wonder if someone got paid off for this exposure. Being mentioned in a national news story in a positive light is the best advertising there can be.
Overall it disgusts me when there are so much more important things to talk about.
WTF? Can the editors please stop bashing Facebook every single time they do anything? For once, everyone I've talked to has been decently happy with this change.
Omnes stulti sunt.
It's also kind of embarrassing that Facebook is on the IPv6 internet before Slashdot...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I wonder if they had ever once just prompted the user to update the information, whether that would have worked as well.
I submitted this story yesterday, with a more positive spin pointing out that th new design is now faster and gives significantly more control privacy wise. What does Slashdot do? Wait a day and then get it wrong. Sigh.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Same here.
It's a bit like Windows 7. You know the thing you want is there, but you don't know where they've hidden it with the latest redesign. So you just type the name of what you want into the search bar, and it magically appears.
which is totally what she said
I disagree. The infrastructure should already exist. It's just a new view on the same data. FB can't possibly re-engineer their infrastructure each time a new page is built. Or maybe they do and that's why they need so many programmers. Either way, something is very wrong over there.
Developers: We can use your help.
I left all of those areas blank from day one and there's nothing changed in my profile. Just because they ask doesn't mean you have to answer.
A lot of the performance stuff is "how can we do X without fetching too many cache keys?" and "how many cache keys is too much given we already have X Y and Z? Which one can we optimize?" The infrastructure for caching does exist, but the infrastructure for efficiently fetching and caching your brand-new feature does not. When you're writing a whole new profile page, you have the dual problems of "I have a whole lot of new features I have to build" and "we really really have to make sure this page is fast".
Omnes stulti sunt.
Some of us don't mind sharing info with friends - or even friends of friends - especially since Facebook is the only way some of them will try and contact people. I personally would rather just get email, but most people never did seem to use email that much socially - even before Facebook.
I can't imagine a well-recieved Facebook update by now. Everything about Facebook seems to be bad, but at the same time every attempt to change it also seems to be bad. I wonder how much this is due to actual problems with Facebook, and how much it is due to people making themsleves impossible to please.
Shouldn't that be grammar Nazism?
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
I've heard that in the next release in addition to showing hometown and birthdate, they will also show last four digits of your social security number, mother's maiden name, favorite movie, and the name of your first pet.
Seriously - it didn't cross the minds of 12 engineers that everyone who uses facebook has hated every single one of the UI changes - and they still continue to do it?
The fact that they still have millions of users and continue to grow, lends one to believe that not everyone hates their updates. People don't like change and more than that they are terrible at imagining how they will use a something that is vastly different that what they currently do. A good business is able to derive a set of features from their customer's wants, and then design a way to meet those wants. Even when the customer may balk at first. If Facebook stayed with their original UI, someone else would have come into the market and replaced them.
Well, then you take your chances, I guess. Just don't complain when your identity gets stolen. What's there is almost enough to do it if you have a fairly unique name. Finding out the rest of your real life identity information wouldn't be that difficult.
I think not... it isn’t really referring to the Nazi party. Sort of like “Kleenex” is a proper noun and should be capitalized, but if you aren’t specifically referring to that brand of facial tissue it would be more appropriate to just use “kleenex”.
Then again, maybe that’s just my opinion. I’m not necessarily saying you’re wrong if you disagree.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
If you think a UI change is what spurs the growth - you are quite foolish.
No, I think Facebook would be just as successful today with its original UI. They could have spent that engineering time actually building more interesting apps and tie ins to other websites, which would have had a more profound effect. No, instead, they moved the logout button 2 or 3 times.
I think you seriously underestimate how much of your personal information is already on the public market to buy and sell. Unless you buy your prepaid cell phone with cash, and send all your credit card bills to a P.O. box.
Just how do you think you might steal someone's identity via Facebook, when their personal info is not publicly indexed (friends-only privacy settings), and only D.O.B., address, and phone number might be available at worst? All of which, by the way, I can seem to find on public info searches online already.
Keep in mind the competition. Before this, the only social network that ever gained many users in the U.S. was MySpace. And you have to say this is an improvement over that. Especially the profiles.
Facebook is so 2009.
Saying "[object] is so [year number]" is so 2008.
"But this one goes to 11!"
You're kidding, right?
So either these "engineers" are low skilled or their systems are a mess.
Could be both, too.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It could be deliberate, you know. I imagine they don't want those people to find those pesky privacy settings easily.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Last time Facebook rolled out a new interface design there was mass outrage, many complained to no end.
This time around the new interface design is opt-in only, and Facebook is advertising all of the cool new friends who have opted in on each user's wall. Subconsciously the users want to be as cool and up to date as their friends, so they naturally opt in as well.
Facebook has avoided the outrage this time around for the most part.
beep
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
It's not better than that, but it IS better than having no such official acknowledgment, because said acknowledgment can be used as leverage to extract sex from merely adequately sexy American women.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I think GP might have been referring to the double 'i', not just the capitalization.
...yet was created.
Webster’s says either one is an acceptable spelling.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
Well, making it easier to do so isn't the right direction to be taking as a company.
All you need is to be part of any of the larger interest groups. A *lot* of people also belong to these and I get several a week trying to get me to join. If you put it up, someone can view it someday or will quite possibly steal it someday. The saner approach is to just not divulge any personal information at all online.
I assumed he thought Justin Bieber was the kid who single-handedly created a singing career by releasing songs of Government documents on his site wikileaks.
Cheers, Chris
I haven't updated my FB info because the last FB "upgrade" nuked a lot of it.