Keep track of friends with Facebook's new look

Shakil published 21 Jul 2008, 19:05 in main - 819 views

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Facebook, the social networking site, today unveiled a new look aimed at making it easier for users to get updates about what their friends are doing.

The newly redesigned site, which will begin to appear this week, will bring together updates about what a user's friends are doing in a central place.

It also aims to tidy up the site by combining several different menus into a single navigation bar at the top of the screen, and grouping features such as adding photos and videos to a page in one tab called "Publisher".

Facebook, which has 80 million regular users, is hoping that the new features will reassure users who have become concerned about the amount of clutter on the site, particularly as they store more personal information on their profiles.

MySpace, Facebook's rival, which is owned by News Corp, the parent company of Times Online, unveiled a new, more streamlined look, last month.

Facebook users will now have more control over their "Walls", the sections of their profiles where friends can leave comments and videos. Downloaded applications, such as Scrabulous, will be listed under their own tab, and information that does not change frequently has been relegated to a less visible section of the site.

Most importantly, however, the manifold updates that a user receives about what their friends are up to — known as "feeds" — will be brought together in a single place, making the site cleaner but also more appealing to advertisers.

Users can have a peek at the newly redesigned site here.

Marketers have long been keen to exploit what Facebook refers to as "the social graph" — the web of connections between users which the site helps to navigate — but Facebook has been slow to capitalise on what is widely recognised to be a valuable resource for advertisers.

One feature called Beacon introduced last year aimed to give "sponsored" updates to Facebook users about what their friends were doing elsewhere on the internet — buying a book on Amazon, for instance — but it was withdrawn after users complained they were not given a choice to keep such information private if they wished.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, later apologised for not making the feature "opt in", meaning that users would have had to sign up before it was activated.

Facebook, which was valued at $15 billion following a $240 million investment by Microsoft last year, is under pressure to convert its growing user base into greater revenues.

The company recorded $150 million in sales last year and is hoping to double that figure in 2008, its fourth full year of operation. By comparison Google, the search giant, earned $440 million in its fourth year — a five-fold increase on the previous year.

Separately, Facebook has brought a legal action against a German social networking website, which it claims has copied the look, feel and features of its own site.

In an action filed with a federal court in California, Facebook alleges that Studivz, a Berlin-based networking site for students, is a "counterfeit product", whose "uncontrolled quality standards" have damaged the "genuine article."

Studivz, which is an abbreviation of the German for students' directory, said that Facebook's claims were "without merit" and that they stemmed from a failure on the site's part to transplant its success in the US to the German market.

"Their strategy seems to be 'if you can't beat them, sue them,'" said Marcus Riecke, chief executive of Studivz. "Facebook was not the first social network, and certainly isn't the only one."

Tags: Facebook, Social Networking Site, Features, New

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