Popular social networking site Facebook has recently introduced a significant change to its home page, replacing the news feed with a "Live Feed". This new feature spawned a significant number of user-created groups protesting the change. In response, a group was created calling itself "I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE," satirizing those users who simply wanted facebook's home page to stay the same.
This is not productive, and the recent TechCrunch article reporting the entry of Facebook's own employees, including Mark Zuckerberg himself further muddies these waters.
Relentless change is not the cure for the issues that Facebook faces. I am personally far less concerned with having instant access to the changes to my friends' friend lists than with the fact that Facebook Chat still cannot cure its lag problem. Instead of focusing on existing usability issues (which could perhaps be helped by actually having an intuitive feedback system), Facebook chooses to push even more features at its users.
This wouldn't be quite so irksome if Facebook doesn't seem to have inadvertently compromised the older News Feed system. The entire point of leaving a legacy interface active is to give people who don't want to use the new model the option of not doing so. Instead, Facebook has crippled the old interface and produced a new interface that inundates the user with far too much information.
Rather than shoving more meaningless content at the user, Facebook could perhaps work on a feature to collapse wall-to-wall conversations that have a habit of taking over the News Feed (or "Live Feed" if you must) so that users can actually view something they want to view. It would be nice to see Facebook attempting some sort of beta-mode for these features as well, to see if they are actually appreciated by the user base.
Instead, by mocking the users who reject their upgrades, Facebook blinds itself to those who may not appreciate the changes to the site, but may still have constructive suggestions to make.