New Facebook Interface: Hate It or Love It?

By Amit Chowdhry ● Apr 11, 2007

Last night, Facebook unleashed a new user interface. Why do it? Sometimes change is good. eBay did it this week, Pulse 2.0 did it this week, Mashable did it recently.

Let’s get straight to the point. What are the pros and cons of the new Facebook UI?

Pros:

– The new user interface has drop down menus for Friends, Networks, and the My Messages section is renamed to Inbox. I was never a big fan of the choice of words, “My Messages” especially since it constitutes all the spam I get on a daily basis. Inbox sounds more like its my e-mail where I’m used to getting tons of spam anyway (thanks GMail!).

– There is another pro within the My Messages section. When you checkmark your messages and click on delete, a pop-up appears asking you to confirm your deletions rather than re-directing you to another page. This saves more time and everyone knows that “Time is money.”

Cons:

– When I was talking to a friend about the search engine placement, he thought that because the search form is placed above “Photos, Notes, Groups, Events and Posted Items,” the search would have the capacity to search within those categories. He was wrong. The search is only capable of searching for friends.

– I currently have 1,123 pictures tagged as myself on the social network. GMail Notifier is a pop-up software that notifies me when I have new e-mails. Earlier today, GMail Notifier told me that I had a new Facebook photo comment from a family friend. Rather than logging into GMail and clicking on the link contained within my GMail inbox message, I decided to just go directly on Facebook and find the comment. To my disappointment, there was no way for me to easily read recently commented photos. C’mon Facebook! You had this feature on the old UI, why did you take it out?

These are what I feel are the pros and cons of the new Facebook UI. Hopefully some of the cons will be addressed. Anyway, its always nice to see a change.