It's Like the New Coke But Worse

Taking a page out of Coke's playbook, Facebook gave itself a facelift yesterday, much to the chagrin of nearly all its users.

The site is attempting to be more user friendly as it increasingly has become the non-MySpace for a lot of its customers. It has added a feed that lets you know which of your friends have made changes to their profiles. Like the blog world, you can have all of your updates in one spot (like an RSS reader) instead of clicking on hundreds of sites or profiles. However, the backlash that has ensued from upset visitors is continuing to grow, despite announcements from Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook:

We've been getting a lot of feedback about Mini-Feed and News Feed. We think they are great products, but we know that many of you are not immediate fans, and have found them overwhelming and cluttered. Other people are concerned that non-friends can see too much about them. We are listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product; it'’s brand new and still evolving.

Nice play, Mark. Luckily for Facebook, enough people like the site that they're not going to leave, and there's no alternative that's half as good. But, it's important to remember that you don't need to overhaul what's already pretty good to begin with. I like Facebook better than MySpace because it's clean, tidy and you're not slammed with ads for dating services or asked to be friends with lots of crappy bands.

My bet is that young millionaire Zuckerberg and crew will change their ways and all of us young folks and students will laugh about the day that Facebook tried to be cool and blew it.