New tab design will help organize average Facebook member's profile 
interface to minimize clutter, but there will likely be speed bumps 
along the way<br><br>Facebook's major overhaul of its core member 
profile pages is a risky but necessary move for the world's 
second-largest online social network, according to several developers of
 popular applications for the site.<br><br>The move is risky because 
Facebook will alter the user interface significantly, which can clash 
against people's natural resistance to change and prompt them to 
complain.<br><br>In addition, for some developers, particularly those 
new to the platform, the new profile design may limit the visibility of 
their applications, affecting their ability to build a user base.<br><br>"The
 redesign seems an overall step forward, but it will definitely have 
speed bumps from an actual implementation standpoint," said Tim 
O'Shaughnessy, co-founder and CEO of Hungry Machine.<br><br>However, 
with the explosive growth in members and in applications on Facebook, 
the average member profile interface has become very cluttered, a 
situation that harms end-users and developers alike.<br><br>"Facebook is
 a social [networking] operating system, and the profile is your entry 
point and your desktop. The utility of that [desktop] interface becomes 
less and less useful to the end-user as it gets more and more 
cluttered," said Shervin Pishevar, co-founder and CEO of Social Gaming 
Network (SGN). Thus, taking a bold step to clean up the member profile 
interface is a logical and natural enhancement for Facebook to make, he 
said.<br><br>Facebook has been talking about its redesign for a while, 
but this week provided concrete details about its plans, which are aimed
 at retaining the layout's orderly and clean look, a differentiator from
 competitors like MySpace.<br><br>At the heart of the redesign is the 
redistribution of profile content into different tabs so that users can 
better organize components such as the activity feed, photos, personal 
information, and applications. In addition, the activity feed tab will 
feature a new authoring control panel for creating and posting content 
called the Publisher Box. Moreover, the profile will have at the top a 
new horizontal navigation line with drop-down menus for its core 
features.<br><br>"The three main goals we have for this are: to make the
 profiles simple and clean; to give users control; and to let them 
emphasize the most recent and relevant content. This is what we've come 
up with as the best way to accomplish those goals," said Facebook's Mark
 Slee, the product manager of the new design.<br><br>Of course, any user
 interface change of this magnitude entails dangers, especially when it 
will affect about 70 million end-users and thousands of application 
developers. Facebook has experienced backlash from changes in the past, 
such as the initial versions of its activity feed feature and Beacon 
advertising program, both of which were criticized for being too 
intrusive on people's privacy.<br><br>"It's a pretty significant 
redesign, so users will definitely have an adjustment period," 
O'Shaughnessy said. "People are generally opposed to change, so there'll
 be a pretty reasonable amount of consternation from users just because 
it's different."<br><br>This is why O'Shaughnessy has been surprised 
that Facebook is opting to roll out all the changes at once, as opposed 
to doing it more gradually, since the latter approach might lessen the 
impact on end-users. "It's always a risk to roll out a really big change
 all at once," he said.<br><br>Yet, Slee is confident that the change 
won't be traumatic for end-users, since Facebook has been actively 
communicating the changes and plans via a Facebook group. Facebook also 
plans to have a time during which end-users will be able to toggle back 
and forth between the old and new layout, before the change is finalized
 at some point in June, Slee said.<br><br>From the application developer
 perspective, the redesign will also have significant effects, 
O'Shaughnessy said. "The applications aren't present nearly as much as 
they were before," he said, alluding to the fact that the new design 
groups applications into a separate tab.<br><br>Although users will be 
able to create tabs for individual applications and the new top-level 
navigation includes a drop-down list of applications, "there's 
definitely the capability for apps to be less discoverable," 
O'Shaughnessy said. "For newer developers especially, that'll be really 
hard."<br><br>Not that O'Shaughnessy worries about being affected by 
this. Hungry Machine began launching its applications in mid-2007, 
shortly after Facebook opened its platform to external developers, and 
they have gained very good traction and popularity, and are generating a
 healthy revenue stream.<br><br>However, Facebook argues that the new 
design will be good for developers, not only because applications can 
get their own tabs, but because users will be able to add application 
controls to the Publisher Box. "All applications will be able to tie 
right into that. We think that's a huge opportunity for developers," 
Slee said.<br><br>Meanwhile, having an entire tab devoted to 
applications will let developers "build a rich and deep experience that 
can take advantage of more space than has ever been provided in the 
profile," Slee said, adding that Facebook is opening a "sandbox" for 
developers to get acquainted with the profile changes.<br><br>Boris 
Silver, co-founder and CEO of Sport Interactiva, a developer of 
sport-themed games, also believes that end-users are likely to recoil at
 first and that visibility for applications in general will be 
diminished, but believes the changes will ultimately be for the better, 
particularly for companies like his whose applications are firmly 
established on Facebook. "It'll give room to high-quality and useful 
applications that people value most to rise up," Silver said.<br><br>Pishevar
 holds a similar view, saying that the changes will benefit applications
 that are genuinely engaging and of high quality, and not those that try
 to succeed via in-your-face, aggressive self-promotion tactics, 
something Facebook has been trying to discourage among developers.<br><br>"The
 apps shouldn't be reliant on real estate on a profile page to thrive. 
There was tremendous benefits early on in the platform from having that 
real estate, but it also made it probably too easy to get users without 
actually investing real resources into making quality, highly engaging 
applications," Pishevar said.<br><br>Despite the possible bumps in the 
road, the developers interviewed agreed that, as far as the actual 
redesign is concerned, Facebook is hitting the right notes. "I'm pretty 
high on the design itself. It's smoother, more efficient, more clear," 
O'Shaughnessy said.<br>