The Facebook Faithful Turn Against Mark Zuckerberg's Redesign
When will Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wake up and realize he made an idiotic mistake by copying Twitter? The Facebook-loving masses loathe the new look — as do Facebook's best pals in Silicon Valley.
The redesign is built around a new "stream" of status updates. It closely mimics the "timeline" feature of Twitter, a much smaller service which, like Facebook user, allows people to post short messages which are then broadcast to friends. But in adopting Twitter's simplified look, Facebook threw out or hid a whole host of features users have grown used to. (Try finding upcoming events, for example, or looking for updates on new friends people have made.)
A Facebook application built to poll users on the design is running 94 percent against the new design, with some 716,000 "no" votes against 44,000 "yes" votes.
One might argue that Zuckerberg didn't do the design to please the lowest common denominator of users, but instead was trying to win over the cognoscenti of Silicon Valley, who have been buzzing nonstop about Twitter. If so, he missed that target badly, too.
Facebook has a special program called "Great Apps" to recognize the best third-party add-ons to the social-networking sites. The favored few include iLike, a music app, and Causes, an app built by a startup called Project Agape which helps people rally their friends to various social issues.
Both have close ties to Facebook: Marc Bodnick, an influential Valley investor who sits on iLike's board, is the brother-in-law of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Project Agape is backed by former Facebook president Sean Parker, who still owns an estimated 5 percent stake in the company.
But guess who's been dissing Facebook's redesign on Facebook? iLike CEO Ali Partovi and Project Agape's Joe Green. Green recently wrote:
The stream does not out-Twitter Twitter and under-Facebooks Facebook.
Partovi snarkily noted that the new design inspired him to join Twitter — and employees at Slide, another Facebook-app maker, applauded his wit:
And mind you, these are people who make a living off Facebook. If they hate it, what friends will Zuckerberg have left?