DISQUS

SocialCash does have many of the same privacy issues as SocialReach:

http://theharmonyguy.com/2009/06/11/more-proble...

This is huge. Kudos to Facebook for taking a risk that will benefit users. I can't wait to see what kinds of applications developers come up with using this.

I never expected them to revert to the old design either, but I was honestly surprised to see the response to criticisms.

From the blog post: "We have the eventual goal of building filters that summarize this activity so you can see a more condensed view of what's been going on." I'm still not clear what they meant by that - isn't that exactly what the old News Feed was? And isn't it contradictory to a real-time feed?

Also interesting: "We're also thinking about ways of filtering out some of the Wall posts and content directed to specific people to focus more on posts shared with everyone." So Facebook is finally moving from more private site for communicating with friends to a more public, FriendFeed/Twitter-like world of broadcasting to everyone. 'Twill be interesting to watch.

I read plenty of VentureBeat articles via Techmeme, but after this one I think I'm going to put you on Speed Dial (go Opera!). Excellent, balanced summary of discussion regarding the new design - you've really added to the dialogue in a meaningful way. Keep up the good work.

I still have some more thoughts on the new Facebook, but those will have to come in a blog post later.

You're probably right about the long-term effects of the redesign, Eric. But I do think this change is quite different from the News Feed, and there may be slightly more backlash. (By the way, I was one of the ones who did not oppose the original News Feed, but I strongly dislike the new layout for a variety of reasons.)

One of my biggest usability issues with the new layout is that I have over 600 friends, and so the real-time feed on the new home page typically only includes updates from the last hour, and those are mostly status updates. The "Highlights" section helps, but it's nowhere near the kind of overview I got with the old News Feed.

Wordscraper is actually quite different from Scrabble, so I'm not surprised it hasn't gained quite the popularity of Scrabulous. However, the brothers recently launched the Facebook app for Lexulous, which is essentially Scrabulous with a new name, an eight-tile rack, and adjusted tile distribution.

I would say that the primary reason Scrabulous was so successful was the quality of design - the official apps simply didn't match up in terms of usability, performance, and features.