Facebook redesign to give users more control

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Facebook is making sweeping changes to the world’s largest social networking site, aiming to give users more control and to curb new forms of spam, company officials said recently. Facebook’s redesign aims to make user profiles more dynamic by giving more prominence to the newest information, and it is cracking down on applications that violate privacy or user-control guidelines.

“Users should have control of their information when and where they want,” said Ben Ling, the head of Facebook’s platform product management. “Users should share things because they want to share them.” Facebook will offer members a cleaner and simpler set of the Web pages which make up personal profiles. These profiles, which can be organised into tabbed pages, let users share tidbits of their lives with select groups of friends or colleagues. Previously, members could edit largely static parts of their profiles such as birth date, education or music interests. “Facebook is making significant changes, both in terms of what information gets prominence and what gets buried,” said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes, adding that the changes may seem abrupt to many users.

Facebook’s popularity has surged since it became an open platform for designers to distribute their own Web programmes 14 months ago—attracting developers who have created 24,000 programmes, and inspiring a new Web vocabulary with terms like “SuperPoke”. But the format has given rise to a new form of spam, nicknamed BACN (pronounced ba-con), sent by software makers using viral marketing tricks to flood members with confusing messages seemingly from friends.

Facebook’s existing design ended up rewarding many software makers for intrusive, attention-grabbing tactics, said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Facebook is trying to weed out the non-important social activities,” Owyang said. “The redesign makes your profile more relevant to other users, telling them who is doing what, where are they and what are they doing socially.”

Facebook, which began in 2004 as a socialising site for college students, has become the world’s largest social network, overtaking News Corp’s rival site MySpace. The latest changes aim to reward designers who create genuinely useful programmes and to stop software makers from forcing members to promote their applications without fully knowing what they are doing.