Facebook has made big changes. Again. And the News Feeds yesterday were, unsurprisingly, bursting with complaints as many of the social-networking site’s 750 million users began noticing the adjustments.
“This is absolutely the worst of the many wrong-headed ‘improvements’ you have made, and that’s quite a feat. I think Facebook’s usefulness to me has now been outstripped by its lack of ease in use,” said a user name Franklin Habit on the site’s official Facebook page.
Other users weren’t exactly as ‘subtle’ as Franklin, though, like Brandon Howell, who succinctly wrote: “This sucks. That is all.”
To be fair, change is always hard for most people, and users complaint every time Facebook revamps their pages, but these latest changes – including a Twitter-like “ticker” in the right-hand corner and an algorithm that tells users what their “Top Story” is – are perhaps a bit too heavy.
And of course, the changes don’t include the highly-wanted dislike button.
Time to Switch to Google+?
In the history of Facebook changes, the pattern has typically been that users complain loudly at first and threaten to leave the site, but then eventually learn to live with the new approach.
But this time, it may be somewhat more interesting. This is the first major overhaul Facebook made since Google rolled out Google+, Zuckerberg and co.’s predetermined arch-nemesis site.
Many of the anti-change posts were coupled with threats to defect to Google+ if things aren’t changed back, and interestingly, the overhaul was announced by Facebook on the same day that Google+, previously an invite-only affair, was opened to the public.
