Facebook's new new new design

[Peggy]

Been playing with Google+ a bit today.

 

[Fred Sherman]

Don't like Google+ and more than Facebook. Don't see any real value in either.

 

[Digital Jedi]

Don't like Google+ and more than Facebook. Don't see any real value in either.

Everyone's value in it is going to be different, really. I would have never started using it for anything more then business networking, if my family and high school classmates hadn't all started friending me all at once. So, since I don't see any of them anymore, it's a way for them to see what's up with my family and how the baby is doing developmentally. I also learned that my niece really enjoys taking pictures of herself in the bathroom mirror ... A lot...

Other people use it differently.

 

[Carlos]

There's another big change coming around the corner - the next few weeks the latest.

The new facebook is dubbed "Timeline" and it chronicles your entire facebook timeline. This is obviously a stab at Twitter's marketshare. However, it is currently a subject of controversy. People are now serious about leaving facebook this time than ever before. Why?

Your privacy is no longer even the tiniest bit private this time around.

http://mashable.com/2011/09/25/facebook-privacy-issues/

The only thing I like about this new "Timeline" profile redesign is the design. Especially that big banner at top.

 

[Peggy]

UGH

 

[Digital Jedi]

So pretty much, it's still something that's only scary to people who don't want other people knowing what they're doing on the internet.

 

[Peggy]

I can't answer for anyone else, but I'm not afraid of anyone knowing what I do on the Internet, as I'm pretty much an open book.
I simply don't like the changes they're making. So far, many of the changes are redundant, such as the newsfeed and ticker having the same info. I don't like the ticker at all, no matter what info it contains. It's extremely uncomfortable for those of us who have ADD.

 

[Digital Jedi]

And when I say "other people" I mean amorphous, artificial entities that store the info as meaningless algorithms.

 

[EQnoble]

Gregg Stefancik 4 hours ago



I’m an engineer who works on login systems at Facebook. Thanks, again for raising these important issues. We haven’t done as good a job as we could have to explain our cookie practices. Your post presents a great opportunity for us to fix that. At the same time, your post reaches some incorrect conclusions that I hope to clarify.

Generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people. We don’t have an ad network and we don’t sell people’s information. As we state in our help center (http://www.facebook.com/help/?..., “We do not share or sell the information we see when you visit a website with a Facebook social plugin to third parties and we do not use it to deliver ads to you.”

Said more plainly, our cookies aren’t used for tracking. They just aren’t. Instead, we use our cookies to either provide custom content (e.g. your friend’s likes within a social plugin), help improve or maintain our service (e.g. measuring click-through rates to help optimize performance), or protect our users and our service (e.g. defending denial of service attacks or requiring a second authentication factor for a login from a suspicious location).

The logged out cookies, specifically, are used primarily for safety and security protections, including:
- Identifying and disabling spammers and phishers
- Disabling registration if an underage user tries to re-register with a different birth date
- Helping people recover hacked accounts
- Powering account security features, such as login approvals and notifications
- Identifying shared computers to discourage the use of “Keep me logged in.”

Most of the cookies that you highlight have benign names and values. For example, the “locale” cookie is simply user’s language and country. I do understand some of the confusion around the ‘act’ and ‘lu’ cookies. The poorly named ‘act’ cookie is a UNIX timestamp with milliseconds and a sequence number that we use to measure and optimize the speed of the site (‘act’ is an abbreviation for “action”). We use the ‘lu’ cookie to identify public computers and discourage the checking of the keep me logged in box. On single user computers, we use the ‘lu’ cookie to prefill your facebook e-mail address on the login screen if you have *not* explicitly logged out.

We also maintain a cookie association between accounts and browsers. This is a key element of our phishing protections. However, contrary to your article, we do delete account-specific cookies when a user logs out of Facebook. As a result, we do not receive personally identifiable cookie information via HTTP Headers when these users browse the web.

Finally, we’ve confirmed that we don’t, and never have, used cookies to suggest friends. If you send us the user IDs of the test accounts you created, I’m happy to investigate further.

Again, my apologies that your previous concerns were not addressed. Since your reports, we’ve introduced a bug bounty program to streamline and reward whitehat security reports (http://www.facebook.com/note.p.... I hope this more secure and reliable channel will be useful for you. We really hope you’ll continue to let us know about issues you see.

I hope these clarifications were helpful. Please let me know if you’d like to discuss further.

 

[Jason]

So, I've been playing around with "timeline" the last two days, and it's definitely an improvement over the current profile and wall. It's also rather creepy, and not because people can see everything you've been doing (as you can change who can see what for almost everything that appears on it), but because it's very easy for people to see everything out of context.

Those drunken photos, random pissed-off updates, smattering of news regarding your professional life, "lost a loved one" updates, etc. form a stilted caricature of your actual life and persona. A lot of these things are designed to be forgotten, but with "timeline", much of your life is all but indelible, published front and center until you go through each item individually and hide or delete it.

And while I always assume whatever I post to Facebook will be made public (they don't have a stellar track record when it comes to privacy), it was still a bit weird seeing updates and photos I had long forgotten shown front and center on my "timeline" because Facebook considered them noteworthy events in my life.

I definitely won't be enabling auto-sharing (except for maybe Spotify). There's a reason why I don't just move into everybody's house when I get to know them. Zuckerberg may or may not understand that - can't really say - but he certainly understands where to get the next dollar.

 

[EQnoble]

So, I've been playing around with "timeline" the last two days, and it's definitely an improvement over the current profile and wall. It's also rather creepy, and not because people can see everything you've been doing (as you can change who can see what for almost everything that appears on it), but because it's very easy for people to see everything out of context.

Those drunken photos, random pissed-off updates, smattering of news regarding your professional life, "lost a loved one" updates, etc. form a stilted caricature of your actual life and persona. A lot of these things are designed to be forgotten, but with "timeline", much of your life is all but indelible, published front and center until you go through each item individually and hide or delete it.

And while I always assume whatever I post to Facebook will be made public (they don't have a stellar track record when it comes to privacy), it was still a bit weird seeing updates and photos I had long forgotten shown front and center on my "timeline" because Facebook considered them noteworthy events in my life.

That is a well thought out assessment in my opinion...I am weird-ed out by seeing myself anywhere online let alone things I don't remember from years ago....I may even delete the one picture of my face on the internet (oops two forgot skype)...which happens to be here and even that has been altered and filtered. Thanks for the insight on this...I am not a fb'r so I have no clue what goes on in that world...but I suppose it might be a good thing for me to learn something about it every once in a while...since like half the world goes there and it might just be relevant

 

[Digital Jedi]

Those drunken photos, random pissed-off updates, smattering of news regarding your professional life, "lost a loved one" updates, etc. form a stilted caricature of your actual life and persona. A lot of these things are designed to be forgotten, but with "timeline", much of your life is all but indelible, published front and center until you go through each item individually and hide or delete it.

Facebook is a stilted caracature of your actual life and persona. So is your account on forums like these. All online presences are. An internet presence is merely a shadow of what your actual likes, dislikes and behavior are.

I definitely won't be enabling auto-sharing (except for maybe Spotify). There's a reason why I don't just move into everybody's house when I get to know them. Zuckerberg may or may not understand that - can't really say - but he certainly understands where to get the next dollar.

Okay, I see that comment a lot. But what I'd like to know, is what changed with Facebook that means Zuckerberg is going to be getting more money? The statement seems to imply that because of sharing, he'll get richer. I don't get that.

 

[Jason]

Facebook is a stilted caracature of your actual life and persona. So is your account on forums like these. All online presences are. An internet presence is merely a shadow of what your actual likes, dislikes and behavior are.

I never said it wasn't.

The difference lies primarily in the type of information people choose to share through Facebook, than say forums like these. Most people, I suspect, share very little of what happens in their life online outside of Facebook. And now, much of that information is being presented in a radical new way, at least compared to past iterations of the site. And moving forward, it's how new friends, co-workers, etc. will be able to easily get a snapshot of your "entire life", as told through Facebook. The fact this may hold true for any online identity doesn't make it any less weird or creepy.

Okay, I see that comment a lot. But what I'd like to know, is what changed with Facebook that means Zuckerberg is going to be getting more money? The statement seems to imply that because of sharing, he'll get richer. I don't get that.

Really? You honestly think sharing has nothing to do with Facebook's success or how it makes money?

The easier Facebook makes it for people to share, the more people will share. In turn, people will be much more likely to return and spend time on the site. This means more eyeballs for advertisements. Facebook may not directly sell this data, but it's a big draw for advertisers, who like to target their ads to those most likely to act upon them.

If people share more and spend more time on the site as a result of these changes (which is obviously the goal), then it's certainly not going to hurt Facebook's bottom line. The opposite certainly would.

 

[Digital Jedi]

Really? You honestly think sharing has nothing to do with Facebook's success or how it makes money?

The easier Facebook makes it for people to share, the more people will share. In turn, people will be much more likely to return and spend time on the site. This means more eyeballs for advertisements. Facebook may not directly sell this data, but it's a big draw for advertisers, who like to target their ads to those most likely to act upon them.

If people share more and spend more time on the site as a result of these changes (which is obviously the goal), then it's certainly not going to hurt Facebook's bottom line.

Well, yes, we can connect the logic of any change to any business to that. What I mean to say is, the sentiment seems to imply some kind of ploy on Zuckerberg's part. As if a "this is going to hurt me, but make him money" Lex Luthor type of scenario.

 

[Jason]

Well, yes, we can connect the logic of any change to any business to that. What I mean to say is, the sentiment seems to imply some kind of ploy on Zuckerberg's part. As if a "this is going to hurt me, but make him money" Lex Luthor type of scenario.

I get what you meant now, and that's not what I was trying to imply. I wasn't clear on my part. I just don't think his idea of privacy is all that compatible with the majority of Facebook's users. I don't think he's trying to be sinister, but rather he really just doesn't get it. On the other hand though, he's made some pretty smart moves on the business side of things.

 

[Digital Jedi]

I get what you meant now, and that's not what I was trying to imply. I wasn't clear on my part. I just don't think his idea of privacy is all that compatible with the majority of Facebook's users. I don't think he's trying to be sinister, but rather he really just doesn't get it. On the other hand though, he's made some pretty smart moves on the business side of things.

Okay, I understand that argument. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I understand it. I don't think the vast majority of users are that, shall we say, concerned(?) about their privacy, or should I say, they only fear what they understand, and sometimes, they understand a conflated or exaggerated sense of what privacy is on the internet.

Case in point, one of my friends yesterday was irritated that her feed layout had been changed without her permission. Her reaction was "well, so much for privacy." Not privacy in that her share settings had been changed, but privacy in the sense that she felt her manner of viewing Facebook was up to her and not Facebook. Add to that the posts I've been seeing over the last few days of people who don't want their every action showing up in the timeline, so they're trying to get OTHER to change that individual persons feed view. Right? So, instead of going to my personal settings and changing how much shows up to my Friends, I'm trying to get other people to click on my posts and change what they see of my posts. Which, of course, is backwards, not to mention impossible, way to do it.

It seems users in general kind of don't understand what Privacy is, on a social network. And it's articles like the Mashable one, who people sometimes read only the title of, and therefore never understand fully, that sometimes create undue paranoia and misinformation.

 

[Peggy]

So, I've been playing around with "timeline" the last two days, and it's definitely an improvement over the current profile and wall. It's also rather creepy, and not because people can see everything you've been doing (as you can change who can see what for almost everything that appears on it), but because it's very easy for people to see everything out of context.

Those drunken photos, random pissed-off updates, smattering of news regarding your professional life, "lost a loved one" updates, etc. form a stilted caricature of your actual life and persona. A lot of these things are designed to be forgotten, but with "timeline", much of your life is all but indelible, published front and center until you go through each item individually and hide or delete it.

And while I always assume whatever I post to Facebook will be made public (they don't have a stellar track record when it comes to privacy), it was still a bit weird seeing updates and photos I had long forgotten shown front and center on my "timeline" because Facebook considered them noteworthy events in my life.

I definitely won't be enabling auto-sharing (except for maybe Spotify). There's a reason why I don't just move into everybody's house when I get to know them. Zuckerberg may or may not understand that - can't really say - but he certainly understands where to get the next dollar.

I take it that you're one of the "lucky" ones to whom the new "timeline" has been rolled out?
Thank God I don't have it yet.

 

[iTuN3r]

I take it that you're one of the "lucky" ones to whom the new "timeline" has been rolled out?
Thank God I don't have it yet.

LoL it's all confusing .

 

[Jason]

I take it that you're one of the "lucky" ones to whom the new "timeline" has been rolled out?
Thank God I don't have it yet.

Not sure if they've started rolling it out or not. Developers have had access to it since last Thursday though. It's going to be opt-in like the last profile change (though eventually everyone will be forced to switch, of course), but I'm sure quite a few people are going to hold out as long as they can.

If anyone was on Facebook back in 2004/2005, it'll seem slightly familiar. They had a similar, though simpler, feature like this back then but killed it off. Guess they changed their mind.

 

[ChemicalKicks]

REDDIT

Stick this on as your Facebook profile picture.