The working world weighs in on the New Facebook

Weekly unique users to an anonymous application on Facebook

Ever since Facebook started debuting their new design and kindly giving everyone the choice to play with it before they make everyone use it anyway, there has been quite the serious backlash about it. It’s not uncommon to hear a random drop something about it, almost as if it were the cool thing to say.

I’ll start off by saying I’m not opposed to the new design. My only complaint is that it looks like they hired an AJAX consultant to go over every single aspect of the design to make sure it was used in every possible place. My roommates—who I will preface by saying they are self-proclaimed non-designers—made a great point by saying their biggest problem with it is that it actually looks WORSE. They sought to clean up the clutter*, but made it so there are a million fonts, font-sizes, areas, blocks of code… blah it’s a mouthful now.

Aren’t we just bloggers? What do we know?

Now, we’re all just social network whores who just use (or at least try) every social application we can. (OK, not everyone. I sure don’t. I only joined Twitter because Ed made me. But for most people, they’ve been around the social media block.) Some embrace it, some reject it. Point is: We understand the social media conventions.

Convention and social media users be damned, let’s talk business. There are those who are already consistent users of Facebook (you and me, the average college student, the pedophile), and there are those who are developers FOR Facebook. I’m talking Mark Zuckerberg and his team, yes, but now that applications are available, I’m talking about the people who are profiting and living off Facebook’s popularity. The more users for them, the better.

Making money

And if there’s one thing businesspeople know how to do it’s make money. And when they saw the new design—they started to scream uncle:

Slide (one of the largest Facebook app developers) helps keeps Facebook users engaged and coming back to the site, and Facebook gives Slide valuable real estate. But app developers who don’t get lots of traffic, money, and other resources may have a much harder time making a go of it on Facebook going forward.

Facebook’s bet

So what does that mean? It means Facebook is taking a bet that their redesign will be embraced. That users will love it and continue to push forward with it, work out the kinks, and get on with their lives. They’ll continue to use apps and drive traffic to “advertisers” (the truth behind apps). As a result, application developers will continue to make money and the symbiosis will move forward at the same great rate it did before re-design.

But do you know what app developers have found? It isn’t working. They’re not happy and they’re seeing users peacing out. See you later Facebook. In fact, Slide has said they’re no longer going to develop new applications, just improve the ones they’ve already got out. The graph accompanying this article (originally from Alley Insider) shows this: when there was a redesign, people weren’t finding their apps anymore. people weren’t using them. The rate was drastic.

The future of Facebook apps

It’ll be interesting to see where this leaves developers. I’m going to go ahead and say the Facebook re-design will do just fine. Remember when your wall could literally be edited by anyone? They could just login and edit someone else’s quote—just like grafitti—to say someone was queer or swear or whatever. Now the wall is literally the heart of Facebook containing every action you make. The “news feed” IS the wall, and I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a ridiculous outcry when the news feed came out. (BIG BROTHER!!!) Now it’s the driving force.

So despite a re-design, we’re going to learn that it won’t do anything to Facebook’s revenue. They have too many users for developers to say no. The alternative to MySpace is still the golden ticket for Facebook users, and we’ll never see Facebook with names like Slutty McBoobs.

* A note here. When Facebook set out to “clean up” their look, they meant take away clutter that wasn’t Facebook related. Ads, apps, you name it—a supposed squeeze. This was the first thing that set developers off.

On the net: Is the Redesign Killing Facebook Apps?