Facebook’s Identity Crisis

Photo: Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us

As online social networks become increasingly prominent in everyday life, competition between the networks is more intense than ever.

In order to keep users interested, the networks are all constantly changing and evolving to try and meet users’ needs and stay one step ahead of the other networks.

And the pressure is greatest when you’re the front-runner.

Just ask Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook. Noticing the rapidly increasing popularity of Twitter, Zuckerberg and his team at Facebook decided to redesign their site in an attempt to stave off their competitor.

The problem is, few Facebook users actually like the Twitter-esque redesign.

Some whining and complaining is inevitable when you change something people are familiar with. That happened the last time Facebook underwent a major redesign, but it did not take the users long to figure out the benefits of the new design and get accustomed to the changes.

That doesn’t seem to be happening this time around. Instead, Facebook has tried to become so much like Twitter that it has neglected much of what made it popular to begin with.

Everything on Facebook, status updates, wall posts, posted photos, shared links, and so on, is now incorporated into one Twitter-like stream.

And it just doesn’t work. Facebook’s news feed was once a well-organized set of highlights from what your friends are up to. Now, it’s a jumbled mess of everything your friends post to Facebook.

“I can’t find anything,” one user writes, “I don’t know what my own status is half the time!”

Another writes, “stop trying to be Twitter, stick with what you are/were good at and put the news feed back to how it was.”

That is the popular sentiment, it seems. In a Facebook poll about the new layout, users’ opinions are very clear. At the time of this writing, approximately 545,000 users voted against the layout. Only 34,000 voted approvingly.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but for Facebook, it may prove to be the network’s biggest mistake yet.

“I’m almost ready to use MySpace again,” said one Facebook user.

Ouch.