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."
More predictable semantic information which can be used in to collect more information about the users. Hooray!
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
"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.
The link in the summary is broken, and points directly to Facebook's "Incompatible Browser" page.
... 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
Didnt everyone hate 'the wall'? Just as much?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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.
Er.. what is Facebook actually??
Farmville bootloader / OS. Also used for Mafiawars and a couple other games.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
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.
http://gizmodo.com/5706926/facebooks-profile-redesign-is-coming-later-today-but-heres-how-to-get-it-now Opera works fine.
Here, I made this "whoosh" just for you.
[FUCK BETA]
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)
I stay in touch with the people in my life outside of FB.
There are a few acquaintances that Facebook put me back in touch with that I would like to stay in touch with via a similar site. Not so many that I need a service to send them a note for me.
As far as everyone else goes if they come with me great, if not no loss.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.