After the billionth invitation to join the trillionth “We hate the New Facebook” group, I started to wonder if there were any groups for people like me that felt like the redesign was a measurably huge improvement.

On Digg, I posted a comment in response to an article that linked to one of the anti-redesign groups that explained why I felt the New Facebook was better. My comment got almost 170 diggs almost immediately and several other people commented to say that they agreed. Here’s what it said.

The new Facebook is a return to being organized and clean. What you call the “old Facebook” is actually more like the “Facebook wearing a MySpace mask.” Anybody who misses the days when Facebook provided an actual alternative to the super chaotic, cluttered mess of MySpace should be happy with the new Facebook, and all the people that are happy with the “old Facebook” should just admit that they like MySpace more anyway. While all the popular kids pat themselves on the back for opting for incredibly bloated profile pages that take an hour to decipher and scroll through because of having a trillion applications littered throughout, the rest of us will have our cake and eat it too by separating the actual profile page from the apps page with the clever/obvious/overdue use of tabs.

However, I agree that they should let each user choose which layout they want since your choosing to keep using a MySpace clone does not affect my choosing to go back to something that tries to be less hectic.

P.S. Anybody who actually thinks that dividing content into a tabbed layout is maze-like is being silly. Tabs are good. MySpace is not.

So last night, I got yet another invitation to join an anti-redesign group, and that was the last straw. I opened up Illustrator and Photoshop, tried to make a clever banner, and started a group called The New Facebook is Way Better.

I’m actually not crazy about Facebook. It seems like most people are on the site more than me. I’m just frustrated by all the people saying they hate the redesign because to me, it’s clearly better, and maybe it’s because I’m a full-blown Digital Arts and Communication major that it bugs me to see so many popular kids decide to worship a terrible design and bash a good one just to try to be hip and rebellious.

I hope you will join and help us be more visible. And if you’re one of the people that joined any of the anti-redesign groups because a friend sent you an invitation, I hope you’ll reconsider (bonus points if you get the person that sent you the invitation to reconsider as well).

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under All Entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.