Facebook to move permanently to new look, possibly this week.
"We're nearing the time where we'll switch over remaining users by default. We expect most of this to take place over the next week."
That's the word tonight from Josh Elman at Facebook.
A couple of weeks ago in one of my (very) rare rants, I took at shot at Facebook for making wholesale changes to the UI. A friend of mine said I hadn't given it enough time. The fact is, for a guy who's always talking about 'embracing change', I really hadn't.
Over the past few weeks, Facebook has announced they now have 100 million users (not shabby by any standard!) and that 30 million have already tried the new format. It's really difficult (as always) to determine how many of the 100 million are really 'active' users and / or how often they log in.
While I realize that it may be difficult to be delivering the old and new formats, especially for application developers, there's a lot of us that spend a lot of time, in a lot of different places.
It brings back memories of when Yahoo 'pushed' everyone to Panama. They gave a lot of notice. They sent a lot of e-mails and mailings.
At the time, I had a client (not a small spend) that completely flipped out. He'd been busy growing his business. Preferred to do PPC himself (and was good at it), and simply wasn't ready to go through a new learning curve. He put it off, forgot about it, and woke up one day to ... Huh?
I find myself using Facebook more and more. There are a lot of reasons. I DID give the new look a quick run tonight, and factually overall it is better.
Facebook should consider giving a permanent switch just a little more time, and some heavy PR to a major change that could come as a surprise to many.