Thoughts on Facebook Revision

From: http://home.donews.com/donews/article/1/127236.html

Recently, after the revision, Facebook's overall framework has finally been fully presented to us. This revision is the biggest UI change in Facebook over the past three years. It has long attracted widespread attention in the industry and app development communities. So why does Facebook perform this revision? What is the impact of the revision on the Facebook-based Open ecosystem? Some of my views are as follows:

1) Facebook is switching from an SNS leader to a platform leader

In the early days of Facebook's founding, only college students could apply to join with their school's email address. Its UI was designed with a x closed frame, highlighted in dark blue, with a small font and white on both sides, it caters to the positioning of the website itself and creates a closed and secure virtual space for students. As Facebook's user base continues to expand, and as they move towards a broader open platform, we can see from the new interface launched this time that a completely open page design is adopted, optimized for resolutions above X. If Facebook is about to exit the old interface of the historical stage and helps them complete the original accumulation of user groups, the new interface of the new version shows that they surpass themselves, ambitious to build an open platform standard based on SNS.

In terms of details, the directory list of the application is moved to the drop-down menu of the page navigation bar. The application occupies the main position on the independent page (excluding the page header and the end navigation, almost no trace of Facebook. The profile page of Facebook is divided by TAG. The distribution of personal information, behavior dynamics, UGC content and friends is more reasonable and more universal. If Google's mission is to make all information on the internet indexed and searchable, facebook's goal may be to become a collection and hosting center for everyone's personal information, behavior, and social relations on the Internet.

2) create a healthy and orderly application Ecosystem

In last July, Facebook launched the F8 platform, allowing third-party applications to be mounted to users' Facebook pages, setting off a wave of open platforms, with more than 0.2 million applications in a year. Today, Facebook is facing a lot of troubles brought about by opening up: the usage of applications has declined; some aggressive app promotion methods have infringed on the user experience; too many apps are installed, which makes the user's profile crowded and messy. the user's freshness to the app has expired, resulting in increased promotion costs for new applications. When Facebook's first-hand application ecosystem faces the threat of a broken balance, they expect that everything will be re-balanced by the new page after the revision.

First, the application modules originally displayed on the user's homepage are moved to the "box" tab, and the presentation opportunities of these application modules are bound to be greatly affected. However, it cannot be concluded that Facebook is squeezing the app's living space. Facebook has opened up a series of new app loading points, including the left sidebar of the user's homepage and the right tab, the operation area on the top of the latest news and the bookmarkdonefile block on the right of the home page. Due to the limited storage space of these new load points, users only select the favorite and most needed applications to add them to these locations. This can be seen as a kind of Facebook's soft control means, encouraging applications to strive to improve quality to attract users' favor, and encouraging users to pick up and display apps through their own choices, finally, we will build a healthy and orderly application ecosystem for the survival of the fittest. The survival space of applications that rely solely on viral promotion and expansion will be suppressed.

3) user interaction and sharing are simpler and more flexible

A controversial design in this revision is to integrate wall and newsfeed on the personal homepage. In addition, users can directly "step on" others' homepages and post content and generate events through publisher, which lowers the one-to-one interaction threshold between users. Facebook provides an interface for applications to mount some operations in the application to the quick release area. As you can imagine, the app will be scrambling to seize this gold location.

News feed and mini feed still occupy the most dominant display position on the page. Therefore, the use of interpersonal event interaction is still the most important promotion means for applications. In the new version, each event in the feed is displayed in a more diverse and diverse manner, including three forms: simple and detailed, and users have full control over the visibility of application events.

4) The revised Facebook version is more conducive to maximizing commercial benefits.

Facebook is undoubtedly a star in the Internet industry, but it cannot become a profitable machine like Google, and even its advertising revenue is far less than its competitor MySpace, this also makes its own valuation quite controversial. Although a new generation of advertising and marketing models based on interpersonal and word-of-mouth communication are most likely to be born on Facebook, Facebook has not yet handed over a complete and outstanding answer in this regard until today. This is too narrow with the original interface space, and it is difficult for advertisements to have a sufficient display space.

There is plenty of advertisement space on the right side of the revised Facebook page (including the profile page and app page), which can help them gain more favor from advertisers and maximize their commercial interests.

It is commendable that Facebook's attitude and method for implementing this revision. From the earliest launch of the profile page's preview version, the process of repeatedly collecting feedback and polishing improvement has been iterated, and the technical changes have been published in the developer's documents in advance, this gives application developers ample space to make adjustments and preparations. On the one hand, we can resolutely implement what we think clearly. On the other hand, we can minimize complaints from users and developers through full communication in the iterative improvement process.

The effect of this revision remains to be verified by data from future operations. However, Facebook's proactive ideas and bold attempts on open platforms are worthy of our admiration.