Introducing the New Profile

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=462201327130

by michaelnovati • 16 years ago

141 106 16 years ago

blog.facebook.com

dwynings• 16 years ago

tokenadult• 16 years ago

And Facebook told me that you (my Facebook friend) already had signed up as soon as I visited that page from the link submitted here on HN.

joshwa• 16 years ago

annoyingly, it published a story about this to my friends; one that I can't delete.

marcusbooster• 16 years ago

It looks like the update is mostly with photos, but I would really prefer an update to the tagging system. Easier control of who is allowed to tag you, what they can tag, and who is allowed to see it.

gte910h8• 16 years ago

I think there should be a couple use cases facebook always protects from, and proves that they aren't going to hurt the person. Here is one:

"Mary is an abused spouse, beaten inches from death once upon a time by her abusive husband. She has since left him and moved to another city entirely, in hiding."

Nothing in the system should allow any information about Mary to leak out. Not pictures of her, not her updates, not her level of participation in the site even. Your tagging is broken if you allow her to be tagged or captions to point her out.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

I think that's very unlikely to happen. People who hadn't been abused would use it widely. Facebook, like Google, wants you to spend as much time as possible on Facebook, which means moving as much as your life into Facebook as possible and making things about others public by default, because that translates to more pageviews. Facebook makes money selling ads, so the more pages you view the more ads they sell. This is their principal motivation.

Keeping things locked-down goes against both precedent that Facebook itself has set and the easy way to get more pageviews. There is probably a market for such a locked-down social network for people in witness protection or secret agents, but I don't think Facebook is very interested in the space.

Estragon3• 16 years ago

It would be nice if facebook pursued the design goal you've outlined, but it would be irresponsible to interact with the facebook system as if that goal had been achieved and cemented for all time.

I think the guiding principle for Mary, or any user, should be that she doesn't type anything into a web browser that she doesn't want publically known and tied to her real-life identity.

paul• 16 years ago

Twitter needs that feature too to prevent people from Tweeting that they just saw Mary at the local store or something.

If you think about your request a little more, you'll see that it's not plausible. There's a reason why people who really need to hide (e.g. witness protection) may have to change their names, cut off old connections, etc.

muppetman2• 16 years ago

You know you can do this already, right? People can tag me all they want in photos, only I see it.

The control are there and they're not that hard to find (IMO of course). Is your problem that they're not there, or that they're not easy to use?

gte910h8• 16 years ago

You can currently hide another users photo from public view if they tag you in them?

If so, where?

crocowhile• 16 years ago

The comments on that page hurt my brain.

cantbecool• 16 years ago

Why do people care so much about minute differences in terms of functionality and layout on facebook?

jonknee• 16 years ago

No one cares that much, but changing something for 500m people will always cause a discussion.

pclark• 16 years ago

You'd care if Hacker News changed in functionality and layout.

mashingkeys• 16 years ago

They'll only care for a few weeks.. like every other time facebook has altered something. I'm personally in favor of the new look, and I think a certain degree of change is healthy now and then.

blahedo2• 16 years ago

I'd be happier with "a certain degree of change" now and then if it didn't always require a full privacy audit on my part to find whatever new opt-out pain-in-the-ass they've slipped in without telling me. They've proven themselves so untrustworthy in this regard that even the updates that seem like they shouldn't have privacy effects need to be audited; and of course it doesn't matter that a particular update doesn't have a privacy violation, because you still need to run the audit to be sure.

rhizome2• 16 years ago

Because the stakes are so small.

flyt• 16 years ago

Because the world spends 700 billion minutes every month looking at facebook.com

meterplech• 16 years ago

I'm impressed by how small the teams remain at Facebook. His profile shows that he worked on this profile revamp with only 6 other people, as well as Chat with 5 others, and the iPhoto exporter himself at a Hackathon. While there have been reports of Google's teams burgeoning in size, it seems that at least for now Facebook is keeping them small. Obviously, these products have had perhaps less depth than Wave for example (which had a 30 person team http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-cant-build-instagr...). But, still, it says something about Facebook that they are attempting to keep team size small.

jiganti• 16 years ago

It's so easy to find reasons for adding another person to a team, but much more difficult to identify when things like groupthink have become a problem as a result of those additions.

Ygor• 16 years ago

"Nine women can't make a baby in one month"

bkhl• 16 years ago

This also implies that Facebook grills their engineers to the point where engineers would get exhausted so easily. Executing huge features with small teams is very great for the company, but does that necessarily mean it's a great place to work? For instance, recently graduated people would be very suitable for Facebook because they are young and single (as in not married). However, people with families would less likely to work for Facebook.

encoderer• 16 years ago

Does it? Not necessarily. At my previous employer I was one of several team leads and we almost always broke into 4-8 man teams.

One of my biggest takeaways from doing that for a couple years is how dramatically productivity can swing based on factors like the texture of the project, the clarity of the goal, the freedom of the TL to make judgment calls without needing to get approval from a BA, morale, the quality of the spec (note that quality != length), etc.

No reason a small dedicated team cannot build large products with reasonable deadlines and a balanced lifestyle. Though, in the interest of full disclosure, in my opinion 50 hours a week is fully balanced and a team can run at 50 hours pretty consistently without ill effects if they WANT to and are HAPPY with their mission and job.

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

Perhaps the most convenient change is that all 4 display ads are now above the scroll line, even on my netbook. Thanks Facebook!

notahacker• 16 years ago

they're wider too, and immediately beneath semi-relevant content...

jyoti002• 16 years ago

Basically, the new profile has become more ad-friendly than what it used to be, user friendly. No, I don't like the way my communications (Wall Posts) have been sidelined and ads have become the most prominent feature in my profile page.

gabea• 16 years ago

I was scrolling the comments wondering if others saw that as well. Maybe their internal designer won his bid for the new design by making the ads more prominent.

faramarz• 16 years ago

I simply love the idea of letting you tag people in the employment history box, and list the projects you've worked on. See http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs1223.snc4/1555...

Give it 3 months before LinkedIn follow suit. fb Keeps morphing ideas into new realities. I have never seen short cycle iterations at this level ever before. They make it extremely difficult for a new player in this space to ever keep up with the level of innovation and change facebook has baked into their culture.

The facebook of last month is too dull and less-relevant than the facebook of next month. Well done, and I salute Zuck for not selling out in the tech world as so many others have.

phlux• 16 years ago

"As you can see, Mr. Anderson, we've been keeping our eye on you for... some time now" <slides FB profile dossier across table>

wyclif3• 16 years ago

New profile, but Last.fm still loads blank in Chrome after several months.

milkshakes• 16 years ago

developer build? mine screws up a few pages

wyclif3• 16 years ago

I thought it was going to be just the dev build, but in Chrome stable it doesn't load either. So, not sure why saying so provokes downvoting...

OzzyB• 16 years ago

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs737.snc4/65739...

I love how that looks. They put all the useful information into a nice bit-sized block, yum... all that's missing now is the guy's SSN.

Estragon3• 16 years ago

A brief synopsis of sexual predilections would be nice, too.

monkey88• 16 years ago

A team from MIT did that already. Mining is easy, and even easier when FB provides so much.

balac• 16 years ago

don't make that information public, and don't friend people you don't know and you will be fine.

mike-cardwell2• 16 years ago

You forgot: Make sure you stay logged in constantly, checking for changes, just in case Facebook change their privacy settings again and make stuff public that previously wasn't.

Terretta• 16 years ago

The layout of that block smells like Flickr-envy.

br1• 16 years ago

I just realized that Facebook uses data more structured than their crushed competition. The relational database pundit in me rejoices.

phwd• 16 years ago

The comments on that page are actually very interesting to read. I try to do my part to filter by voting down what I do not like and voting up what should be addressed. That is just how it is when you allow 500M users to say their view regardless of age group and other demographics. You get a multi-layer of " I want this , this and not this " but then a next person says the opposite. Some people want it to stay the same ...others welcome change.

They are not joking around when they meant that they wanted to make the world more social. Because of this change my dad realized where the Poke Button was located. Go dad.... If you remembered the boxes' (Top Friends ,Gift Boxes etc) removal a while back you would see that (at least to me) the current change made sense. Now the focus really is in the interaction with the user (info,photos and wall are packed in the top middle) and their interests not the "glitz and glamour"

Now the real item that needs /that I hope it is not really a need.. I cannot tell Facebook what they can and cannot do/ to be addressed is the 10% of friends option ( this has been discussed in other formats 10 friends,8 friends ..etc). The everyday user does not interact with all of their "Friends". If you can force me to choose only 10 or so of my real friends to interact with ..those that I mail,sms,send messages, actually see outside ... that would be great.

If you could even couple notifications with Facebook Chat on your phone ... FBM (FaceBook Messenger) /BBM/ . Just an alternate reality thought.

bgentry• 16 years ago

In the guided tour and blog post, it says that the photos displayed at the top of your "new profile" are "recently tagged photos". Most of the ones that keep showing up for me are very old. Is everybody else experiencing that?

It also seems like the order of the photos is somewhat randomized when I go to view all of my photos (as opposed to being reverse chronological order). Weird.

sounddust• 16 years ago

Yeah, same here. It seems a bit buggy; a couple more examples: it's impossible to say you live in Paris, France (only random cities elsewhere in the world named Paris), I can't turn on chat while looking at any of the profile pages (but can turn it on on any other page), etc..

indrekj• 16 years ago

"Share: Question" doesn't do anything (ajax 404).

AdamTReineke2• 16 years ago

Hehe, yup, I checked too. :-)

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

Another change that must be fairly recent:

If you admin a fan page, you can now see instant info on each post, including number of impressions and percent of feedback..

"174 Impressions Raw number of times this story has been seen on your Wall and in the News Feed of your Fans · 0.57% Feedback"

nano81• 16 years ago

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/01/20/facebooks-page-admi...

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

Weird. I definitely did not have that on pages this September, when I was actively managing a page for an event. I'd have been very happy if I had.

d_r• 16 years ago

I wonder why Facebook moved away from easy Twitter-style status posting. It used to be (about two versions ago) that the "what's on your mind" textbox was open by default and it was easy to post a status. For sometime now, you have to click "Status" first to do it, which almost seems like they'd like to discourage users from doing it?

rorymarinich• 16 years ago

When you click Status, it auto-focuses. So isn't it still a one-click process?

thomaspaine• 16 years ago

Based on the analytics at a startup I used to work at, photos are a much better driver of user engagement than status updates. I'm guessing the same is true for facebook, and anecdotally, most of the facebook comments I receive are on photos and shared links, not status updates.

enjo• 16 years ago

Wow.. my feed (primarily non-technical) couldn't be more different. I'd estimate it abouts 80% status updates and comments on the same.

jyoti002• 16 years ago

If the status update is mundane like "am eating a bagel" and you have a really funny photo of eating a bagel then the photo is definitely going to win the comment competition. If you use the status update intelligently, like tweeting about something that will interest your group then you can have a good discussion going on with just a few simple lines. Like a Tweet on FB Wall.

rradu2• 16 years ago

Actually from what I understand, only a small number of users got the change you're describing, and that happened when they introduced Questions (which neither I nor many of my friends have yet--I still have the "Twitter-style status posting")

cmelbye2• 16 years ago

I applied for the Questions beta months ago, but didn't hear anything back. I have the non-Twitter-style publisher including a link to post a question, however it doesn't actually work. Quite strange.

rohi81• 16 years ago

From my perspective this is more structuring of data. If you look at the profile in the example its a very clear organization step.Advertisers will now have a better and easy targeting mechanism than the usual demographics info.This I think is more of user training where people enter the data on how facebook wants to see it; why would a friend of mine who has known me long enough need information in this structure?

Facebook is now going to be able to sell super targeting techniques to marketers. Google relied on machines to do this, Facebook just asked its users to do the same;needless to say its a master stroke :).

dekayed• 16 years ago

Is it just me or are the advertisements when viewing a profile larger and more in focus?

AdamTReineke2• 16 years ago

I like it, but the Education info seems buggy. I added half a dozen classes to my college, and now have half a dozen college entries each with one class. :-(

siddhant• 16 years ago

Its interesting to see how Facebook keeps on coming up with changes in its UI every now and then. Take one look at Orkut in its current state and you have enough reasons to assume that either they don't have any designer working on it, or even if they do, they simply aren't putting enough resources.

marciovm123• 16 years ago

Looks like Facebook is going for the social resume play w/ the jobs/projects page -- unlike LinkedIn, you add WHO you worked with, which makes all the difference. Just missing whose contribution you "liked" to get a professional endorsement graph.

noarchy• 16 years ago

I definitely won't be making use of that. I go out of my way to keep my professional contacts and info far away from my Facebook profile. I use LinkedIn for professional contacts, and I keep that decoupling quite intentionally. My privacy settings on Facebook are cranked up about as high as I can get them, while my LinkedIn info is largely public.

benatkin• 16 years ago

My comment on the page, pretending FB is going to read it:

> I like the additional structured data. Even if I had time to figure out how to structure my Facebook data the way you've done it with this release, it doesn't help much because my friends would have to pick apart the structure. It's a framework where you can expect certain things to be in certain places, like Ruby on Rails.

I was annoyed when they made everyone convert interests to links to pages, but it adds more edges to the graph, and graphs between entities (starting with people) has always been a big part of Facebook.

zone2• 16 years ago

any one know how i can switch it back to the "old" one?

davidwparker• 16 years ago

Seconded. I tested it out, and I don't prefer it... but I can't find a way to switch back. Anyone know how to switch back or is it even possible?

kloncks2• 16 years ago

...and just like that, Facebook revamps profile to add Twitter-like sharing, MySpace-like focus on pictures and media, and LinkedIn-like employment, education, and projects details.

This is brilliant. It's good ole Facebook with Twitter + LinkedIn + MySpace. Executed brilliantly!

CGamesPlay• 16 years ago

I'm a little curious as to what you mean by "Twitter-like sharing". Wasn't the old way more like Twitter?

kloncks2• 16 years ago

I'm largely talking about where I see Facebook going, rather than just this specific update.

Overall, I think the Twitter-like feature updates have been numerous and obvious.

primigenus2• 16 years ago

One thing that's fascinating me is how they're letting this update deploy virally, by itself.

You sign up for the new profile and your friends are going to see you did. If several of your friends do it, you're going to see that a number of them did. This is bound to be at least somewhat convincing, given that you trust your friends more than the faceless evil of Facebook Corp, and therefore it might be worth doing, and your curiosity will be piqued.

Given Facebook's history with negative feedback around new features, this seems to me like the most brilliant part of the entire new profile - and it's very subtle, too.

cmelbye2• 16 years ago

Yes, it seems to be working very successfully. The tour of the new features that appears after one's profile is upgraded was great too. Here's hoping they follow this model for future features.

evanrmurphy2• 16 years ago

> One thing that's fascinating me is how they're letting this update deploy virally, by itself.

Are you saying it's opt-in only for everyone? My friend got the new profile automatically, though I did not. I see that I can choose to get it manually, but the FAQ also says you cannot revert.

Perhaps I've misunderstood your comment. I would be really impressed if the feature had total viral deployment (i.e. opt-in only for everyone), and if it allowed you to change back to the old profile at will.

primigenus2• 16 years ago

I imagine they'd seed a few million profiles to start with, so probably a few people ("a few million" equates to "a few" in the Facebook ecosystem!) got converted over to hotstart things. Not surprising, really.

Allowing you to change back to your old profile at will wouldn't be a very feasible move, I'd imagine. You want to move your userbase over to the new code as soon as possible so you can start iterating on that for everyone, without worrying about maintaining two versions.

flyosity• 16 years ago

I'm upset that they won't let you put programming languages into the "Languages You Speak" box.

There's gotta be at least one Facebook engineer lurking on this post. If so, how about a fix? :)

jdp23• 16 years ago

not sure how much to read into this, but the comments on the Facebook discussion are overwhelmingly negative

brown9-2• 16 years ago

Every Facebook UI change is the worst change ever since the last Facebook UI change.

haploid• 16 years ago

I wonder how long their software deployment process takes. I do not see this change, nor do I see an option to switch to this change.

metageek• 16 years ago

>Featured Friends

>You can now highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your family, best friends or teammates.

Cue increased drama in 3...2...1...

furyg3• 16 years ago

Interesting that FB notified a 'pending' friend (someone who's friend request I have not yet accepted) that I have switched to the new profile. Seems strange...

Introducing the New Profile

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